


Thirty Years and Change (the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad)

by sunsmasher



Series: Thirty Years and Change (the olympics verse) [1]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Background Relationships, Future Fic, Getting Together, Illustrated, M/M, Major Character Injury, a single picture counts as illustrated right
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-21
Updated: 2016-10-21
Packaged: 2018-08-23 13:39:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8329939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunsmasher/pseuds/sunsmasher
Summary: It’s July 10th, 2024, and Oikawa Tooru is an Olympian. His smiling face airs on an NHK promo every 45 seconds. He’s captain of the national men’s volleyball team, reigning star of the professional leagues, and he hasn't spoken to Iwaizumi Hajime in two years.He has, however, sent Iwaizumi tickets for the 2024 Los Angeles Summer Games.
  “So go,” says Matsukawa's voice. “It’s only a few weeks. You’ve got a whole city to hide in if it gets awkward, and if it doesn’t get awkward, well…”

  It’s like watching the future reconfigure, like being in high school again, watching team after team fall to Oikawa’s faultless planning and shameless charm.

  “I’ll get to watch a whole lot of volleyball,” Hajime says, and resigns himself to fate and/or Oikawa Tooru.

  “Hey, when you get there, can you bag a gymnast for me?” Hanamaki asks, and Matsukawa squawks.





	

Hajime taps the sheaf of papers against his thigh. There’s a lot of them, tickets and boarding passes and vouchers for cabs all held together with a too-large alligator clip. He’d had to print the whole lot of it off the captain’s computer at the end of his shift— he hasn’t had a printer at home since he moved out of his parents’ place.

He’d done it all furtively, though there hadn’t been reason to. It’s July 10th, 2024, and Oikawa Tooru is an Olympian. His smiling face airs on an NHK promo for the Los Angeles games every 45 seconds. He’s captain of the national men’s volleyball team, and the rest of Hajime’s fire crew would probably complain that they hadn’t heard about it sooner _,_ one of their own being friends with an Olympic silver medalist and never breathing a word. One of their own with two paid flight vouchers and eight game day tickets and a note saying not to worry about accommodations because it’d all be taken care of by the time Hajime got to LA. One of their own given an entire itinerary with only a familiar winking emoji as the sign-off.

Hajime scrubs his face in his free hand and tries not to crush the print-outs. They’re the first message he’s gotten from Oikawa in two years.

“So you’re going to go,” says his phone.

“Of course he’s going to go, he isn’t stupid,” continues his phone in a new, bored tone.

“Guys,” Hajime growls, and snatches it off the counter, bringing the mic closer to his mouth. “It’s really not that simple.”

Hajime’s got a pretty nice phone. He saved up for it. It sounds like Hanamaki is scoffing right into his damn ear. “Maybe he is that stupid,” says Matsukawa, like he’s remarking on the weather, and Hajime tries not to crush his phone, either.

“It’s not stupidity,” Hajime snarls, “It’s—”

He stumbles.

“Stupidity,” Hanamaki and Matsukawa say together, and there’s the muffled noise of two hands high-fiving. Hajime drops the phone back on the counter, tossing the papers next to them, and runs his hands through his hair.

“Caution,” he says, which still isn't the right word, though it's closer to it, and the noises on the other end of the line cut off.

His hesitation drags, and Hajime becomes aware of the prompting silence emanating from his phone. Despite being very much alone in his tiny plastic kitchen in his tiny Sendai apartment, Hajime still finds himself staring holes into the cheap tile floor.

“We haven’t… talked much recently,” he finally says.

“Yeah, we know,” Matsukawa replies. He sounds slightly less bored than before, which is charitable of him. “And if we didn’t already know, your mom probably would have told us.”

Hajime’s mom is a traitor and a gossip. He sighs.

“Seriously, guys. I really don't think this is a good idea. It’s been fucking ages since we last spoke, it’s not—”

“Oh, what, like you call us so frequently?” Hanamaki cuts in. Hajime twists to glare at his iPhone.

“Excuse me?" he says, and then, the immediate thought: "How often do you fucking call _me?”_

“Exactly!” Hanamaki shouts, loud enough to make the sound come tinny through the phone speakers. “Oikawa Tooru is calling, Iwaizumi! Pick up the phone!”

“That doesn’t make any fucking sense—”

“Don’t bother arguing it,” Matsukawa says, underneath Hanamaki, who is still proselytizing.

“Renew the blade that was broken!” shouts Hanamaki, with feeling. He somehow contrives to echo grandly in the plastic hollow of Hajime’s kitchen, despite his physical absence. “Reforge the bond that was lost!”

Hajime knows what they’re doing, making him angry so he’ll stop making himself maudlin, but after all these years they're still pretty good at it. “Listen, shithead—” he starts, leaning both hands on the laminate and looming over his phone, and Hanamaki laughs triumphantly.

“Okay, alright, you’ve made your point,” Matsukawa says, as the noise of a phone being hotly contested swarms Hajime’s speakers. “Takahiro, would you just—” A pained grunt. “—well, you brought that on yourself, now didn’t you. Iwaizumi.”

“What,” Hajime snaps, a nice stew of Makki-induced frustration still simmering in his heart.

“Can you take the time off work?”

Hajime raps his knuckles against the countertop twice, three times, a short, stinging burst. “Yeah,” he says, “I’ve got the leave saved up.”

“And it’s all paid for?” Hanamaki is silent in the background. Either Matsukawa’s sitting on him or he’s sent him to cool off in a corner.

“Yeah. I think he’s paid for the airfare out of his own pocket.”

A muffled whistle. Hanamaki again. “So he wants you there,” Matsukawa continues.

“Yes.” An unavoidable fact.

“Do you want to see him?”

Hajime swallows. He leans heavier over the countertop, feeling the muscles tug between his shoulderblades. His back bows in the dim quiet of his apartment.

“Yes,” he says, and it’s like it’s someone else speaking with his voice, through his mouth.

“So go,” says his phone. “It’s only a few weeks. You’ve got a whole city to hide in if it gets awkward, and if it doesn’t get awkward, well…”

It’s like watching the future reconfigure, like being in high school again, watching team after team fall to Oikawa’s faultless planning and shameless charm.

“I’ll get to watch a whole lot of volleyball,” Hajime says, and resigns himself to fate and/or Oikawa Tooru.

“Hey, when you get there, can you bag a gymnast for me?” Hanamaki asks, and Matsukawa squawks.

 

* * *

 

After three hours at Narita, eleven on the plane, and a miserable two with U.S. immigration, Mastukawa’s yes/no approach to reconciliation is starting to feel a lot less compelling.

Two years without a word to each other, even their mothers’ exchange of gossip beginning to thin, and before that the interminable decline in contact that was only recognizably a decline in hindsight. In real time, living the day-to-day of it, there’d been nothing worrying at all. They were busy people. Hajime had been at the fire academy, then paying his dues at his first firehouse, and Oikawa went pro. He was playing for the Panasonic Panthers and smiling his way through every “Up and Comers!” feature the networks could throw at him.

It had seemed natural. It had _been_ natural. Sometimes friendships just lapsed. People fell out of touch. Even best friends, for better or worse. You changed and grew and you moved on, and trying to revive the specter of a childhood friendship just because you know these other two guys who think they have ideas about how you should run your life and manage your business and handle your—

To conclude, Hajime should never have done this.

The general cacophony of the LAX international arrivals gate isn't helping his mood any. The flight left him a skin-crawling combination of antsy and exhausted and the world as a whole is, in order, too loud, too bright, and too full of people more interested in scanning the crowds than walking at anything above a slow meander. He has no idea what time it is. He barely has a concept of what day it is, and he’s about to punch someone in the back of the head.

Instead, Hajime shoves himself and his duffel bag between two grey-haired Indian aunties and tries not to bowl over a five-year-old as he makes for the terminal exit. Flying is despicable. Flying makes his teeth ache, and he _still_ doesn't know where he's meeting Oikawa. There's a text on his phone saying "See you in LA ~~" but that's the sum total of what he's got to go on. If he has to walk the length of LAX looking for Oikawa he will, if only because he isn't sure his English is good enough to get him to the Olympic Village alone at 9pm, but god. He really, really doesn't want to.

He shoulders his bag, he looks up, and—he sees him in the crowd.

Only the back of his head. The flip of his hair. Still it feels weirdly quelling, like a hot shower after a long exertion. Relaxing, almost, seeing the line of Oikawa’s shoulders jump as he laughs and raises a hand. Hajime feels like an idiot pausing five feet back and staring, but it happens regardless. What an unexpected thing, to be looking at Oikawa again.

There’s a multiethnic herd of fans surrounding Oikawa, and he’s laughing as a paper and pen are thrust at him. “Ladies,” he's saying in English, “Gentlemen!” He tosses a wink at the baby-faced young man who’s holding out the paper with a committed look in his eye. Hajime’s English isn’t good enough to catch the next phrase, but he could spot the well-honed seduction that accompanies “One at a time! Please! I’m only one man!” at a hundred paces.

“Hey, assface,” Hajime says, and the grandiose silhouette of Oikawa Tooru freezes.

He turns, and it's like a flashbang. His shining face, his bombshell grin, his arms outstretched, and Hajime's bag hits the linoleum as they collide with a fury. Oikawa laughs against his neck and Hajime finds himself hugging back tightly, one hand clenched in the fabric of Oikawa's fancy fucking tailored blazer.

"Iwa-chan, you came!" Oikawa says, sing-songing like a six foot bird of paradise, and Hajime thumps him hard between the shoulders. Oikawa’s glasses ride up against his cheek.

"Of course I did, dummy," Hajime says, trying to act like he's only smiling reluctantly when they pull away. The quirk in Oikawa's grin means he isn't buying it. That antsy feeling that’s hounded him since the plane, the anxiety Hajime would never call an anxiety where anyone could hear him, is fading in a hurry. "You paid for it, didn't you?"

"Well, yes, I am very rich and famous now," Oikawa smiles, with that heavy-eyed look that means he's angling for a reaction. "But I was worried you might be intimidated by my fortunes, genius, and exceptionally nice hair."

Hajime punches him in the bicep, which seems to satisfy. Oikawa is laughing in that wheezy way he does when he means it sincerely, lit up by a smartphone flash from somewhere in his lingering crowd of fans. The twink with the pen is looking faintly put out even as he scrambles for his phone. It’s annoying, Hajime isn't paying too much attention. Oikawa is still looking at him avidly, hand just above Hajime's elbow, and Hajime's looking back.

"So you're saying your mom ditched you and you had tickets to spare," Hajime says, a drag as thoughtless as breathing.

Oikawa winks. "She said one Olympics was enough. Having such a high-achieving child is a real burden on her, you know."

“You’re such—” Hajime starts, then cuts off, blinking, as another camera flashes. The light is kinda painful, someone angling their phone high to try and get the shot, but Oikawa doesn’t seem to notice. His smile is warm.

“You’re such—” Hajime tries again, but then there’s another flash, in his periphery, like an ambush. He doesn’t understand how Oikawa can stand this, attention constantly being pulled from one photo-happy fan to another like a fish on a line.

“Don’t mind the remoras, Iwa-chan,” Oikawa says, voice breezy, “They’re just jealous you’re getting up close and personal with Oikawa-san.”

“Yeah,” Hajime says, dragging his focus back to Oikawa, his friend Oikawa, Oikawa’s hand warm on his bare arm, “they obviously don’t—”

Flash. The words die in Hajime’s throat, swallowed by the antsy feeling, suddenly returned, suddenly in his mouth, making the world seem pitchy and too-bright. Oikawa doesn’t see it yet. Hajime doesn’t want him to— he doesn’t want to— Flash. His gaze tears from Oikawa’s face to the hungry crowd to, like a fish on a line, Oikawa’s thumb rubbing a small, warm circle against his skin.

Hajime swallows. _Up close and personal._ He takes a step back.

It’s instinct, an urge he only recognizes as he’s fulfilling it, but as soon as he looks up he knows it was wrong. Whatever compelled him, he shouldn’t have let it. In the half-second between speech and motion Oikawa’s gaze has shuttered. His smile is suddenly perfect. Hajime watches as, in a casual, unhurried motion, he tucks the hand that had been holding Hajime’s arm back into his pocket.

“Sorry,” Hajime starts, with no real idea of what he’s apologizing for and only the knowledge that he must, but Oikawa just pins his smile wider.

“We should grab a taxi,” he says, as if Hajime had never spoken. “It’s a bear of a drive to the Village, and we wouldn’t Iwa-chan to fall asleep before he’s met the team.”

He sounds like he’s giving an interview. Hajime is suddenly, wrenchingly certain that it wasn’t supposed to go like this. It was supposed to have happened differently. They were best friends, childhood friends, voted most-likely-to-share-a-mortgage friends in a yearbook poll Hajime’s still sure was rigged, but now Oikawa’s smile looks like it could have been cut and pasted from a photo taken by any fan in the crowd.

The flashes are still going. Hajime wants to make them stop. Hajime wants to leave. Hajime doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do.

"Sure," he replies. What else can he say? "Hail me a cab. Don't get us mugged."

He grabs blindly for his bag as Oikawa turns towards the door.

 

* * *

 

The security is tight at the Olympic Village, and the line through it pretty long, but it's bearable. Moreso than fucking immigration. They move another foot forward and Hajime drags his bag another foot across the grass. It's weirdly plush.

"We're on a college campus," Oikawa says, answering his question before he asks it. "UCLA. University of California, Los Angeles.” He says it once in English, then in Japanese. “Apparently there’s some prestige attached to the grass."

From what Hajime's been able to observe of Los Angeles' climate in the three night-time hours he's lived in it, Los Angeles is a fucking godawful waterless desert, but whatever. Not his tax dollars at work.

The line, and the wait, give him time to think. And look. Oikawa isn't much different from the last time he saw him (two years ago and change, maybe a year after the Tokyo Olympics, still buoyed upon the team’s silver medal, their fame, the validation he'd always hungered for), but the passage of seconds, of two and a half years of seconds, have had their effects. There's a few more lines around his eyes. Oikawa's left pinky curves like a stalk of grass bent in two, unable to retake its original shape. He must have broken it again, and healed it again. There's a few grey hairs at his temples, thought Hajime's not stupid enough to mention them. Not yet, anyways. He'll stockpile that observation for when he really needs to throw Oikawa off his game.

Hajime pauses, looking out over the incongruently green campus, and shuffles his bag forward again. Saving up burns—that's an old thought, a high school and college thought, a still-friends-with-Oikawa thought.

He’s not sure he knows what they are now.

They’re standing apart. Not obviously, not to anyone to else, but for Hajime, who grew up with Oikawa draped over his shoulders and whining into his hair, it’s glaring. A careful foot and a half of separation. Not so far so as to be mistaken for strangers, but their legs won’t brush. Their knuckles won’t mistakenly touch. Maybe this was his mistake, Hajime thinks. You don’t talk to your best friend for two years and you expect to be welcomed back into his life with open arms, you expect everything to be what it was, maybe this is what happens.

The night is artificially bright, lit by the ebullient flare of the Village and the steady, year-long illumination of the dorms. God, Hajime can’t believe the best athletes the world has to offer, Oikawa included, are being put up in student dorms. Nice ones, admittedly, with ungodly amounts of grass and some decent trees and a gradual accumulation of slope and plazas that leads to the line itself, tendrilling out through yet another break between the residence buildings. The gap in architecture allows just enough darkness to see the stars. Not as many as Sendai, maybe, but a bright handful more than Tokyo.

Hajime exhales easily, and then risks a glance over to Oikawa. The captain in question watches the line placidly from behind his glasses, thinking hard about something he doesn’t want Hajime to know. It shows in hands, shoved into the pockets of his slacks. Hajime looks away.

“So how are you getting me through security?” Hajime asks, instead of any of his other questions begging an answer. “Last I heard, only athletes and staff are allowed in.”

Even media are thin on the ground, with the gymnastic trials running and the opening ceremonies some nineteen hours away. Hajime, who hasn’t done anything beyond pickup soccer and the occasional arm wrestling match in years, shifts uneasily.

When he glances back, though, Oikawa looks indescribably pleased with himself.

“My ace is staying at a hotel with his family but never bothered to tell the JOC,” Oikawa smirks, patting down his blazer. “You’ll be using his badge. Maybe come up with an excuse for your hair.”

 _Your ace?_ Hajime thinks. “My hair?” Hajime says, and then Oikawa passes him a keycard and a photo ID.

Hajime stares at the photo. The photo stares back. “You’re fucking kidding me,” he says.

“I would never kid you, Iwa-chan, you know that!” Oikawa replies sunnily as a security guard gestures them forward. “But really, puff out your chest, this is going to be tricky.”

 

* * *

 

“Oho ho!” Oikawa’s ace says when Oikawa and Hajime walk onto the court, Hajime blinking owlishly against the stadium lights. “Oho ho ho!!”

“I brought you your secret doppleganger,” Oikawa grins, and then steps back to let Hajime be assaulted by Bokuto Kotaro and a real fucking rib-crusher of a hug.

“Iwaizumi!” Bokuto bellows as Hajime wheezes desperately. His feet aren’t touching the ground. “It’s been too long!”

“Bokuto,” Hajime manages, spine creaking. “How’s it—” _inhale, inhale while you have the chance!_ “—hanging.”

“It’s great, man! Just amazing! We’re at the Olympics!” Bokuto beams as the rest of Team Japan begins to take note of the hubbub. Oikawa waited until their practice was nearly over to interrupt— the curious faces converging on their group are red with exertion, and another team, looks like Poland, is waiting at a near edge of the stands for their turn on the court. The stadium is massive, what looks like every block of seats the University had in storage pulled out in preparation for the games, and the mingled voices of teams and coaches and earlybird fans echo cacophonously.

Oikawa starts up a running commentary as the team begins to introduce themselves and Hajime finds himself too busy firmly shaking hands to smack him upside the head.

“And this is Minami, our middle blocker—” A brick shithouse with dimples smiles kindly as he takes Hajime’s hand. Hajime loses feeling in his fingers. “—He brought his favorite Doraemon pillow with him and we all love him very much. Oh, and this is our libero, Fukao, who won’t let me braid his hair at all—”

The libero, a stocky young man Hajime recognizes from the spare few professional games he’s watched since Tokyo 2020, smiles easily. He’s got a nose that’s been previously broken and an impressive ponytail. “Captain doesn’t really take no for an answer,” he grins, and Oikawa, stationed at Hajime’s shoulder, pouts flagrantly.

“My team has no respect for me,” Oikawa sighs, to a general chorus of agreement. Hajime decides they’re all good people with qualified taste. “Except for Tobio-chan, of course,” he adds, and Hajime starts.

“Kageyama’s here?” he asks, surprised suddenly at the lack of… symptoms, on Oikawa’s part, but then the beanpole himself appears, coming into view behind the mountainous blocker, with his hair cut short and messy and a childlike roundness still dogging his features.

“Hello, Iwaizumi-san,” he says, bowing politely when they shake hands. It’s stilted and awkward, which makes Hajime grin.

“Good to see you again, Kageyama,” he says, and means it sincerely. Out of the corner of his eye Oikawa seems completely relaxed, gazing at Kageyama with the condescending fondness one shows their favorite dumb cat who has gone an entire week without getting locked in the fridge. It’s interesting. New. Maybe by the time you’re captain of the Japanese men’s national team, certain high school anxieties start to seem less urgent.

It’s always nice to have hope, at least.

“Hey, Captain, did this guy play with you in high school, too? Is there fucking anyone in Japan who didn’t play with you in high school?” one of the team calls, as Hajime says, “You’re looking well, Kageyama. Still keep in touch with that quick little spiker from Karasuno?”

“Yes,” says Kageyama. “He’s in the stands.”

Hajime stops. “What, really?”

“Iwaizumi-san!” says a small orange shockwave squeezing its way between two wing spikers and a blocker. “I didn’t know you were coming!”

“And now he’s here,” says Kageyama, as Hinata starts shaking Hajime’s hand with vibrating speed.

“Oikawa-san didn’t say anything! When did you get to California? Isn’t Los Angeles amazing? Are you really a firefighter now? Akaashi-san said you were—”

“Wait, Akaashi, too?” Hajime says, cutting Hinata off. Hinata doesn’t seem to notice. _“Is_ all of the high school circuit here?”

“No,” Kageyama says, helpfully. “Just family.”

“Which still seems to include so many people,” Oikawa adds, nudging Bokuto in the ribs. “Look alive, Bokuto-chan.”

“Huh?” Bokuto says, pulled from enthusiastic conversation with the long-haired libero, and then, “Oh! Oh! Keiji! Love of my life! Keiji!”

Hajime follows his beaming gaze to Akaashi, and the small, wispy-haired baby crying with a fierceness in Akaashi’s arms. “Take your daughter, Kotaro,” Akaashi says as he approaches from the stands, exhaustion obvious under his usual composure. “She doesn’t seem to be a fan of stadiums.”

Bokuto accepts this duty with a passion, scooping the baby and her trailing blankets from Akaashi’s arms with a froth of enthusiastic baby-talk. Akaashi smiles faintly, watching Bokuto prattle as half the rest of the team gathers around, cooing at the pink-faced baby and her toes! the smallest toes in the entire world! and then faces Hajime. It’s a tired smile, but not one without sincerity.

Hajime returns it, feeling more at ease than he has in weeks. Whatever may be going on between him and Oikawa, he’s always been able to speak Akaashi’s unruffled language. They may have only talked six times since everyone left for college, and he probably should have remembered that he and Bokuto had a kid, and he _definitely_ should have remembered that they were married at all, but it doesn’t worry him much. He and Akaashi have always gotten along just fine.

“What a pleasant surprise, Iwaizumi,” Akaashi says. _Oikawa didn’t tell us you were coming and I’m more than a little shocked,_ he means.

Hajime extends his hand for one final handshake, one corner of his mouth twisting in an automatic smile. “Good to see you, too,” he replies, “Glad I could make the trek.” _This was a shock for everyone except Oikawa, and you know exactly how long it’s been since he and I talked because I met Kuroo for drinks five months ago and Kuroo gossips like a hen._

Akaashi smiles politely, crossing his arms loosely over his chest. “Unfortunately, I’m a bit tired at the moment, as I’m sure is more than obvious, but we’ll have to catch up at the opening ceremonies tomorrow. I assume you’ll be there.” _I don’t want to hear a word about your Oikawa problems until I’ve slept, eaten, and showered._

Hajime can respect this. “Of course. Don’t think I’ll be allowed to miss it.”

“It’s a date, then,” Akaashi says, still with that small smile, and turns back to the crowd of tall, well-muscled men arguing who gets to blow a raspberry on his daughter’s tummy next. “Kotaro, are you done for the night?”

“Oh!” Bokuto says, surfacing from the rabble. “Of course, honeybunch! I’m ready to go, just need to—Hey!” he shouts at the team. “Who’s got my beautiful sprog?”

“Your beautiful sprog is safe with Oikawa-san, who is never ever giving her back! No, he isn’t!” Oikawa says, demonstrating excellent baby-babbling technique as he hoists the happily-squalling child into the air.

“Oh, if only,” Akaashi mutters beside Hajime, blinking slowly, as Bokuto butts in.

“Hey now, Captain, come on, get your own,” Bokuto says, and Oikawa surrenders the burbling child with reluctance, his moue pronounced. Kageyama peers over Bokuto’s shoulder, seemingly unsure of what’s expected of him in proximity to a baby. Hinata jumps for a better look.

“Team mascot?” Hajime asks him. The Polish team is beginning to file onto the court.

“Iwa-chan!” Oikawa gasps, putting a scandalized hand to his chest as the Japanese team starts to disperse. “Natsumi-chan is the heart and soul of this team! Our emotional core! I love her.”

Akaashi hangs another bag of baby paraphernalia around Bokuto’s shoulders as one of the Polish players waves at Natsumi. Natsumi, with Bokuto’s help, waves back. Hajime smirks.

“Because she loves you, right?”

“Iwa-chan, she _adores_ me. She fit my entire thumb into her mouth yesterday.”

The conversation has carried them back outside the stadium, Oikawa’s team shouting their goodbyes are they head out. “Don’t let babies do that, dumbass, they’ll get sick. Or you will,” Hajime adds, jabbing Oikawa in the ribs.

It wasn't a gentle hit, but Oikawa only smiles faintly, rubbing at his side. He’s looking out over the campus.

Hajime closes his fingers around his thumb, holding it until the joint pops.

“Do you—“ he tries, “Do you wanna get a drink or something? Hit up some of the parties?”

Oikawa hesitates. The two of them stop, surrounded by the genial crowd of athletes, volunteers, and hangers-on filling the carefully-manicured mile between stadium and village.

The night is warm and dry, some parched electric wind making Hajime prickle with sweat in his t-shirt and jeans. Oikawa, dressed like a camera crew could jump him at any moment, looks comfortable. At ease. Like he’d looked on the court with his team. He’d been the gregarious captain among them, introducing each player with a teasing confidence that bespoke real understanding, and the eager sincerity that Hajime remembered from Aoba Josai. Here is my team, and I believe in them. Here is my team, and I insist you believe in them, too.

He’d looked good. Hajime had been glad.

Oikawa’s smile is camera-ready, but there’s at least an apology in the way he maintains that careful distance from Hajime, weight balanced too casually over one foot.

“I couldn’t keep you up,” he says. It’s immovably kind. “How long have you been awake now?”

Hajime swallows and accepts his cue.

“Too long,” he huffs, not untruthfully, as they start again towards the Village. There’s a scream of laughter from a plaza ahead of them, one with American flags strung like tinsel across every balcony. The noise grates. “Not like I could sleep much on the plane, all the fucking snoring my seatmate was doing.”

“Oh, poor Iwa-chan, such a delicate princess.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Hajime scowls. “Fuck you too, wiseass.”

The light of the campus lampposts guides them on through the broad, dry trees and the besieging happiness of the crowd. A man stands on a retaining wall with a cyclist’s thighs and a stripper’s showmanship, and as another article of his clothing goes sailing overhead, Hajime and Oikawa’s mindless, shallow patter is subsumed by the cheers.

 

* * *

 

Day One of the XXXIII Olympiad, Hajime wakes up to sixteen text messages and an abiding need to punish jetlag for what it’s done to him.

 _Good evening, dear!_ says the first text, from his mother, delivered at 2:39 AM.

 _Will Tooru be playing today? I want to catch him live! Maybe I’ll see you in the stands!_ says the second text, delivered shortly after.

 _cermonies only today games tomrrow_ Hajime replies, rolling onto his stomach. The bright blue light of his phone in his eyes is… it’s bad. It’s some bad shit.

Texts three through sixteen are from Hanamaki and Matsukawa’s shared number, and contain eight pictures of their cat, uncountable emoji (approximate), and a link to an article about the 285,000 condoms the City of Los Angeles purchased to stock the Olympic Village.

Hajime texts back a washed-out picture of his middle finger and throws the phone down the bed.

 

* * *

 

“So it just happened naturally. Really.”

“Fucking cross my heart,” Hajime replies, bouncing Natsumi-chan on his thigh. She bubbles happily at the mouth, Hello Kitty-brand baby earmuffs strapped over her head, and Akaashi watches Hajime with what Hajime thinks is patience.

He's not one hundred percent sure, though.

“Nothing happened,” he states, again, for the record. English songs he barely recognizes are blaring over the loudspeakers as the Italian athletes move past their seats in the Rose Bowl stands.

“Hm,” says Akaashi.

“Sometimes people just grow apart!” says Hajime, reasonably.

“Hm,” says Akaashi.

“Woooooooo!” cheers Hinata as one of the Italian women waves in their direction.

The loudspeakers sing something about dirty beaches and a sunset. “We just—” Hajime starts, and then cuts off when the next country enters the stadium.

Not Japan. Jamaicans. Hajime realizes he’s leaning out of his seat, Natsumi-chan compressing like a very cheery beanbag against his chest, and sits back slowly.

Akaashi is looking at him. “Look,” he says, as Hinata props a knee against Akaashi’s shoulder and stands his other foot on an armrest, still waving and whooping, “We all saw you two in university. Iwaizumi, you used to carry a spare bottle of eye drops in case he’d fallen asleep with his contacts in again. Friendships end all the time, even friendships like yours, but if you two were as close as you looked, these things don’t always happen without reason.”

Hajime bounces Natsumi again, unable to reply. Eye drops, yeah, and a protein bar, too, in case he’d forgotten to eat dinner.

Akaashi sighs as the Japanese Olympic delegation begins its march onto the field and Hinata’s cheering accelerates.“And either way, if you’re really intent on reconciling, then it's him you should be talking with, not me.”

“And if he doesn’t want to talk?” A swimmer Hajime faintly recognizes marches with the flag at the front.

“I didn’t know that was possible,” Akaashi replies, and Hajime laughs.

“Yeah, well” he starts, as Hinata starts screaming “Tobio! _Tobio!”_

They look up. Kageyama, his twigginess his most discernable feature at this distance, is staring with apparent fixation at any point that isn’t the stands. His cheeks are the same patriotic crimson as his uniform. Hajime raises an eyebrow, glancing between Redfaced McBeanpole and Hinata’s deafening cheers.

“Are they—?” he starts, having to shout now as the rest of their section begins to get to its feet, waving at the athletes, and Akaashi shrugs dispassionately.

“We’ve all asked,” he shouts back, taking Natsumi from Hajime and holding her high against his chest. Flashes of Bokuto’s hair are visible among the approaching athletes. “Every time, Kageyama replies that Hinata is his roommate and then looks confused by the question. Hinata insists that they’re best friends, and is equally confused by the question.”

“You’ve gotta be more direct,” Hajime hollers. Bokuto, down on the field, has caught sight of the two astounding, superlative loves of his life and is blocking foot traffic as he waves at them with both arms, his torso, and a small Japanese flag. Akaashi waves back, hiking Natsumi up until she’s visible above the crowd. “They’ll never figure that shit out on their own.”

Akaashi laughs, broadly and sincerely, waving Natsumi’s little hand at her far-off father. “What excellent advice, Iwaizumi!” he says as Oikawa comes into view, grabbing Bokuto by the elbow.

Oikawa’s smiling his most resplendent smile, perfectly coiffed and probably covered in concealer, and when Akaashi’s shoulder nudges against his, Hajime barely even feels it.

 

* * *

 

Day Two of the Games, Team Japan savages the Argentinian men’s team in the first round robin match and Hajime wrecks his throat cheering.

Day Three, the team spends their day off running drills and eating their weight in complex carbs, and Hajime goes into Los Angeles with Akaashi and Natsumi and some of the friends and family. The second-string libero’s wife, a half-American woman exulting in the chance to play tour guide, takes them to three taquerias in a row and Hajime slumps back to the Village that night having regretfully consumed about a pig and a half in carnitas.

Oikawa is leaning against his door.

“Iwa-chan,” he says. “You’re late.”

“Fuck you I’m late,” Hajime replies. It’s a reflex.

“So mean,” Oikawa says, with a faint pout. He’s wearing track pants and a t-shirt, his hair still damp with sweat. Must have just come off the court, though Hajime knows practice wrapped at least an hour ago. He’s watching Hajime with unabashed intent. Hajime isn’t one hundred percent certain why.

“Dear, sweet, Tobio-chan hasn’t been seen since practice ended,” Oikawa says, lolling his head against the doorframe, “And he isn’t in his room. Our game tomorrow is at nine, and we all need to be at our best to defeat those toned Brazillians and—”

“No,” Hajime says immediately, like that’ll fucking stop him.

“—and as my vice captain—”

“I am _not_ your fucking vice captain—”

Oikawa’s grin has grown until it creases the corners of his eyes.

“As my _former_ current vice captain—so picky, Iwa-chan,” he continues, too fucking pleased by Hajime’s scowl, “You have to help me find him. No two ways about it.”

Hajime crosses his arm over his chest and glowers, to little effect. “And if the little cheese grater’s just in the bathroom and ignoring your texts?”

“Iwa-chan!” Oikawa gasps, with unfeigned delight. “How could you even say such a thing! Cheese grater-chan could be dead for all we know!”

Hajime snorts, eyeing Oikawa. “In your dreams, maybe. Is this for real?”

“Basically,” Oikawa shrugs, smile calming. He isn’t affecting his easy pose when he looks at Hajime, which is almost unexpected, three days into their so-called reunion “We have a nominal curfew of 10pm. Most of the older guys don’t bother with it, but this is the first time Tobio-chan’s ever missed it. He’s very punctual.”

“And you’re sure he’s not just out—” Hajime gestures. It’s an internationally-recognized madhouse outside, after all.

“Getting laid?” Oikawa laughs. “Tobio-chan?”

“Yeah, ha, suppose not,” Hajime says. “Alright, let me just take a piss.”

Oikawa’s surprise is nearly too faint to register. Which is dumb. Hajime knows an olive branch when he sees one, even if it is a stupid fucking olive branch. There’s no way Kageyama _isn’t_ in the bathroom ignoring Oikawa’s texts, but if this is the excuse they’re using then fine. He’s shamefully thankful for it. Better than this itching, toothy discomfort that’s been dogging him since the airport. Better than a careful distance.

“Don’t take too long!” Oikawa calls as Hajime stumps past him to the bathroom, squinting against the overbright dorm lights. “Who knows how many vending machines he’s stuck in by now!”

“You’re a shitty person!” Hajime shouts back, and Oikawa’s high laughter follows him down the hall.

When they make it back outside the night is balmy and acrid, thrumming with a party that hasn’t stopped for breath in 72+ hours. Hajime and Oikawa weave through a shifting legion of get-down as they make for the southeast exit, towards the stadium, tides of horny superhumans parting around them. Hajime applies elbows where necessary. Oikawa flirts indiscriminately.

“So you and Kageyama,” Hajime starts, as they start to near the edge of the Village and speech becomes possible. Someone’s running laps of the plaza wearing only a sock.

“Are the two best ranked setters in Japan, despite my vastly superior looks, personality, and people skills?” Oikawa offers, winking at startled sock man. Hajime scowls, but doesn’t cuff Oikawa, much though he wants to.

“You’re terrible, but otherwise, yeah,” he says, staring sock man down until sock man gets the idea and jogs his way around a corner. “You are. And you seem okay with that.”

Oikawa doesn’t look surprised this time, though Hajime might once have expected him to.

“He’s an excellent player and I’m proud to have him on the team,” Oikawa says, which, to Hajime’s own surprise, is true. Oikawa has his hands back in his pockets, leading them easily through security and down the low-walled path to the stadium. “I still can’t quite get him to toss to us as fast as he did to Shrimp-chan, but even his second-best speed is still miles ahead of almost anyone in the professional leagues. We could have used him in 2020.”

Japan had taken silver in 2020, medalling in men’s volleyball for the first time in almost 50 years. That had been before they drifted apart, before the whatever-it-was happened that Akaashi is so convinced of. Hajime had found Oikawa after the medal ceremony and congratulated him. He’d been genuinely happy for Oikawa and had tried to impart that happiness to him, grinning as best he could, a hand gripping each exertion-warm arm. Oikawa had returned his attempts with a bland smile. _A bronze means you got a medal,_ Oikawa had said to him, as if explaining to a child. _A silver means you lost._

“You would have wanted him there?" It comes out more incredulous than Hajime had intended.

Oikawa glances at him as they enter the stadium, the cavern of it dim and echoing in the absence of anything except maintenance staff and expectation and them. Hajime feels himself being measured.

“Blunt as ever, eh, Iwa-chan?” Oikawa says, after a studied moment, and Hajime is momentarily chagrined. This— idling beside a volleyball court and letting Oikawa talk about himself— is the closest they’ve come to their old normal since whatever misstep happened at the airport, but Hajime reminds himself that _close_ is not _there_. Oikawa’s gaze is calculating, his interpersonal odds-making as unknowable to Hajime as it’s ever been, and Hajime shouldn’t have pressed his luck.

But then Oikawa looks out across the court, smiling thinly, and slumps. Not much. It’s almost indiscernible in the low brown lights of an afterhours stadium, but it’s there, and he lets Hajime see it.

“If we both make it back to the Olympics, Kageyama will be starting setter in 2028,” Oikawa says. “I’m sure if you’d been there you’d have told me not to ask, but I did, and Coach told me. It was obvious anyways, anyone with eyes can see he’s a better player than me, but—”

Oikawa laughs, another sharp bone of himself given over, and hooks his fingers through the net bisecting the court. His arm hangs loose from the shoulder.

“But they still need me as captain,” he says, tone unarguable. “Straight from Coach’s mouth. I’m more valuable to Japan as captain this year than Kageyama is as starting setter. I have that. For now, I still have that.”

His fingers have curled tight around the cords of the net, and Hajime realizes they’re both breathing shallowly, Oikawa with a familiar fervor, himself in—he doesn’t know. Anticipation. Expectation.

“This year I’ll get gold, and in four years they can start a monkey for all I care because the captain who led Japan to our first gold medal in fifty years will have been _me.”_

Oikawa’s grin is feral, his knuckles white, his gaze fixed at some point across the court, and then he laughs again. It’s breathy and satisfied, and Hajime finds himself relaxing as Oikawa does, until Oikawa’s turning to smile at him again, eyes sparkling.

“That’s what you wanted to know, right?” he asks. “Why I’m not making him clean my sneakers or trying to lock him in equipment closets?”

Hajime shrugs. “I had some concerns,” he replies, and Oikawa laughs.

“Old Mama Iwa-chan still looking out for her little chickies,” he croons as they continue across the court (not that, at this point, there is any possibility that Kageyama is here and somehow escaped their notice), and Hajime groans.

“Don’t you start on that shit again, I swear to god.”

“Making sure everyone’s playing nice and eating their vegetables and not locking anyone into equipment closets at all!”

"Whatever, fuckhead," Hajime says, as their pace begins to veer towards the aimless and Oikawa’s laugh bounces among the folded seats. "This is what I get for looking out for you."

Oikawa stops and catches his eye, expression starting, in a soft way, to shine. "Still?" he asks.

Hajime is reminded, with a sharp intensity, of a night, some night, before they graduated college, when they’d cleared all of their friends out of their apartment and shoved most of the beer bottles into a corner and Hajime had suggested, because Oikawa looked more worn-down by it all than usual, that they just put on some old kaiju movies and fall asleep in their jeans, and Oikawa had caught his eye, expression starting, in a soft way, to—

The warmth in Hajime's chest is sudden and startling. "Old habits die hard," he says, talking over the sensation. If his sullen tone sounds a little forced, Oikawa doesn't notice.

Oikawa’s smile is smug and familiar when he looks away, giving Hajime time to, in a deep confusion, collect himself, and then they freeze.

There, on the deck ringing the first tier of seats—

“Tooooooobio-chan!!” Oikawa shrieks, clapping his hands around his mouth. It echoes like a fire alarm and the skinny, dark-topped figure above the stands jumps violently. A much shorter, much brighter-haired figure comes into view behind him.

“Oh my god,” Hajime says. “That’s not—”

 _“What do you think you’re doing with my setter, Shrimp-chan!”_ Oikawa hollers like a banshee, like a ghoul, as the figures go darting for the exit.

Oikawa whips around, dazzling with the chase, and beams at Hajime. “Come on, we can’t let them get away!”

He grabs Hajime’s wrist and pulls him into stumbling motion, cackling like an anime auntie before Hajime can even react, or realize he’s failed to react. He gets his legs under him and they dash back across the court, under the stands, through to the concourse, Hajime finally pulling parallel as they pass the Jamba Juice.

Kageyama and Hinata are nowhere in sight. God knows where they went. A shuttered pizza joint flashes past, and a cafe.

They could have fled out the opposite end of the stadium for all Hajime knows.

Oikawa’s face, glimpsed in profile, is alight.

Hajime’s smile is wide and helpless. He keeps up.

 

* * *

 

They don’t find Kageyama and Hinata. The next night, after the Brazil game (3-2, a nailbiter, Hajime thinks he saw the opposing captain cry) they don’t find them either. Not that they try very hard.

The fourth night in a row that Oikawa shows up at his door complaining of an absentee setter, Hajime has not thirty seconds ago seen Kageyama walk down the hall with toothbrush in hand. He gets his wallet anyways. They spend the night eating street food and trying to get to Hollywood, and when they end up at the beach instead Oikawa tries to dunk him in the surf and comes very fucking close to getting a black eye for his troubles.

Day Six, game three, Oikawa ruins the Russian men’s team’s day. The last rally of the game, receive, set, spike—Fukao to Oikawa to Bokuto, is nearly too fast to follow, but when it’s over and the last whistle blows, Oikawa strides through the mob on the court and drapes himself across Hajime like a long, sweaty cat. He’s glowing with the victory. Hajime can feel Akaashi’s eyes on them as he slaps Oikawa’s back, grinning wide enough to ache, but it’s easy to ignore.

“So you and Oikawa seem to be back to normal,” Akaashi says the day after that as they wait for appetizers at a team lunch, and Hajime realizes he’s almost right. Oikawa hasn’t rifled through his luggage yet, though that may be a sign of long-awaited maturity, and he hasn’t contrived a reason to fall asleep on top of Hajime yet, though Hajime feels certain that’s imminent, but otherwise he’s… there. In Hajime’s life again, in Hajime’s space, snatching his phone from his pocket to exchange long, incomprehensible strings of emoji with Hanamaki and Matsukawa (a development met with much (Party Popper )(Party Popper )(Party Popper )(Party Popper )from the Matsuhana unit) and whining incessantly. Whatever distance lingers between them is vanishing rapidly, one overproduced demand for attention at a time.

“Seems like it,” Hajime responds, doing a shitty job of hiding his small and mortifying smile.

“Good,” Akaashi says. “Don’t screw anything up.”

Hajime snorts. “Yeah, thanks, that’s helpful. Don’t know why I listen to you anyways, you’ve only got a loving husband and an adorable kid and I assume a perfect, clean house in the suburbs.”

“The house is very nice,” Akaashi allows, “But for the other two—”

As one, they look across the table.

Natsumi, shrieking delightedly and on the whole having a wonderful time of it all, is propped upside-down on Bokuto’s lap as Bokuto uses his free hand to, for whatever reason, point out the clasps holding the bottom of her onesie together. Hinata, Kageyama, and a seven-year-old of unclear provenance are watching this demonstration curiously. All five of them, father, daughter, and onlookers, are splattered liberally with baby food. Dark, recalcitrant-looking stains are beginning to set.

“Never do this,” Akaashi says to Hajime. His stare is transfixing. It is frankly unclear how serious he is. “Never make my mistakes.”

Japan sails out of the preliminaries with four wins and a single loss to the Norwegians. The Norwegians fall to the Canadians in a quarterfinals match that Oikawa watches with what he refers to as “cosmically appropriate” relish and Hajime refers to as “why, god, are you like this.”

Japan’s quarterfinal match, against the Brazilians again, is too close for comfort. The Brazilians play with a hunger for vengeance, scoring three aces in a row to win the second set, and Hajime and Akaashi watch tense from the stands as Oikawa pulls his team into a huddle before the third.

They break as the rumble of the crowds begins to crest, and Hajime watches as Oikawa touches each one of his teammates as they take their positions, clapping his hand to shoulders and backs and the backs of necks. It makes something coil in Hajime, fern-like, to see it from the outside. He’s never known if Oikawa’s conscious that he does this after each huddle, or if it’s just a reflex. If it settles something in him, too.

Japan takes the third set, and the fourth with twenty eight points. In the fifth set their attacker, Ikeda, long-legged and with a face like a macaque, cuts a hit nearly parallel to the net that almost takes the Brazilian blocker’s nose with it. It paints the court line. It’s a force of nature. Hajime can see Oikawa’s grin from the stands, all blood and purpose, and that’s the ballgame. Brazil doesn’t score another hit. Japan advances to the semifinals with a thunderous fifth set, and the crowd, Hajime not excluded, loses their goddamn minds.

 

* * *

 

“My mom’s gonna kill me when I get home,” Hajime says that night. “I was supposed to film all your best moments for her.”

“Oh, but Iwa-chan,” Oikawa replies, smiling wide and bright and searingly happy, “You’d never have enough film!”

“You’re such a fucker,” Hajime laughs, and shoves an elbow into Oikawa’s side. Oikawa stumbles sideways, howling about broken ribs, and so they make their way through the too-lush grass and bright-washed darkness of the country club golf course they definitely just broke into. It’s nearby the university and empty of almost anyone. Oikawa strides through it like a king in his castle. Hajime is 70% certain they’re going to get arrested.

“Are you sure that wasn’t a guard we heard earlier?” Hajime asks as Oikawa says, “Your mom really wanted you to film me?”

They pause, eyeing each other. Oikawa raises a well-shaped eyebrow. Hajime relents.

“Whatever, when they shoot us it’ll be your fault,” he says. “And of course she wants me to send video. She hates the NHK commentators. And, you know, she still loves you more than me. Your Aquafresh ad is probably still her lock screen.”

“I’m,” Oikawa says, then, “surprised.” It sounds true. Hajime watches his profile in his periphery, treading carefully on some divots in the turf. “I haven’t seen her in a long time.”

It’s the closest they’ve come to discussing the absent two years. Hajime suddenly finds it an easier thing to acknowledge, and subsequently not give a shit about. Oikawa’s here, with him, in an American country club with minimal security and oddly-climbable fences. The light of some far-off clubhouse paints his face in soft, thin lines of rose and orange.

“What can I say?” Hajime says, happiness rolling like water down his skin. “You always did compliment her curry more than me.”

“I was such a smooth criminal in high school,” Oikawa says, maybe a bit distracted as he ducks Hajime’s grab for his collar, and then he says, “I—”

He hesitates, starting at some point far distant of them, and Hajime pauses. There’s that warm, dry wind again, sending a static feeling creeping between Hajime’s fingers. It pulls at the wisps of Oikawa’s hair like stalks of wheat.

“I think this tape’s coming undone,” Oikawa says suddenly, holding up his right hand, the third and fourth fingers bound loosely together, and flops down to the ground. “Help me fix it.”

Hajime looks down. Oikawa, long-limbed and making a show of it atop the grass, looks back.

Hajime scowls. “Really?”

“You’d leave your poor captain in distress?” Oikawa pouts, waving the taped hand dramatically between them.

“Once and future fucking captain, huh,” Hajime growls, though of course he’s already on the damn ground, knocking a knee against Oikawa’s, accepting the diversion, grabbing hold of his hand. The night’s too warm for him to feel the heat of Oikawa slouching beside him, but the sensation persists. Hajime tries not to think about it.

“Who wrapped this, Natsumi?” he asks as he peels the tape off and carefully holds Oikawa’s fingers steady.

“So rude,” Oikawa replies, sounding cheerful about it. It’s his ring finger that looks sore, the middle knuckle swollen and warm under Hajime’s touch. “I’d like to see how good you are at wrapping fingers with your left hand.”

“Better than you,” Hajime says, looping the bandage as best as he can around Oikawa’s fingers. Not exactly a masterpiece, but it’ll do until they can get new tape back in the Village.

“Hm, that is pretty good,” Oikawa says, face close to Hajime’s as they both peer down at Oikawa’s hand. “I thought you weren’t playing much volleyball anymore?”

Hajime shrugs. Their shoulders knock together when he does. “I’m not,” he says, “But I still practice this kind of shit. I’m training for my paramedic certification.”

“Iwa-chan wants to be a paramedic?” Oikawa asks, gaze curious as he pulls back for a better look at Hajime, and then he grins. Hajime feels an immediate, certain sense of distrust.

“Iwa-chan wants to be a paramedic because of _me?”_ he sings, and Hajime, unfortunately vindicated, bristles.

“What the goddamn shit, Oikawa—”

“Oh, it’s true! I knew it! Look at your face! You want to be a paramedic because I blew my knee when we were fifteen!”

Hajime splutters. The knee in question, the old white brace long put away, jostles his butt.

“Fucking—not everything is about _you,_ Oikawa,” Hajime snaps, though he knows there’s a flush crawling up his face, and he knows Oikawa knows it, and Oikawa is still grinning.

“No, no, it is,” Oikawa replies, smiling with all of his stupid, perfect teeth. “All of it, all of the time. And this in particular. You were so worried about me, Iwa-chan!”

Well, yes, Hajime fucking had been, because Oikawa’s knee had come out of its fucking socket in the Seijoh gym and Oikawa had screamed as the weird hump of bone pushed cartoon-like at his skin, and Hajime had been so certain as the coach called 119 and Oikawa clung to Hajime’s jersey that something deep and bloody and irrevocable had just happened. And when the paramedics had arrived and peeled Oikawa from him and told Oikawa that everything would be fine, with low, sure voices, Hajime’s sense of certain doom had eased. And eased further. And his mom let him off school the next day to lie around Oikawa’s room and say not much at all as Oikawa sniffled softly into Hajime’s t-shirt, the noise almost hidden by the Godzilla movie playing on Oikawa’s dad’s laptop, and then the next day Oikawa was back at school, ready and waiting for the class to sign his crutches, and in ten weeks he was playing again, and Hajime didn’t have to worry anymore at all, except for all the ways he always worried, constantly and despairingly.

The paramedics had helped, though. They’d known what they were doing. Hajime had liked that about them. At some point he’d started wondering if maybe he could learn what to do, too.

Hajime doesn’t say any of this, though. Because he’s not a jackass.

“Go fuck yourself,” he says instead. For better or worse, it’s far from a denial.

The night is warm and replete with showy American stars. Oikawa’s face, silvered and bright, folds along all its hidden happy lines. _“I knew it,”_ he says.

His hand closes around Hajime’s, callouses and sprains and all. Hajime hadn’t realized he’d still been holding it. Oikawa’s fingers fit unevenly between his.

“I missed you, too, Hajime,” Oikawa says, as the wind bears down upon them again, ruffling the overgreen grass, lifting the light in Oikawa’s eyes. “I’m sorry we didn’t talk for so long.”

“I—” Hajime stumbles, flushing again. Oikawa’s gaze is calm, his smile steady as a bulb. Like the light Hajime remembers from the living room in their old university apartment. Something not too bright, but with a good uselife. Something that could last you thirty years and change.

Hajime swallows. “There’s nothing to be sorry about,” he mutters, after too long a pause, and finally tears his gaze from Oikawa’s. They’re sitting knee to knee. He has to search pretty hard to find some point in his view that isn’t attached to a silver-medal Japanese setter. “Shit happens, you know?”

“Maybe,” Oikawa replies, choosing to be a cryptic fucker about the whole thing, and then his hand closes tighter around Hajime’s. “Come on,” he says, voice warm and rising as he hauls first himself then Hajime to his feet, “We should get back to the Village.”

“Gotta get your beauty sleep, right?”

“Iwa-chan, you say that like all my sleep isn’t beautiful. It’s very offensive.”

Oikawa has to drop Hajime’s hand to duck his swing, but when he rights himself, laughing wheezily, their knuckles brush as they make their way towards the uneven brick wall of the club. They climb it, they jump from it, they don’t get shot by Americans. Hajime catches himself staring at Oikawa, at the line of his shoulders as they stroll back to campus, at the sharp gestures of his hands, and realizes that this, the hot, overfull sensation in his chest, feels uncomfortably like eating, or sleeping, or breathing, after having gone too long without. Like being close to Oikawa is a function of his biology he ignored at his own peril.

Hajime is assailed by the slightly dizzying feeling that he’s been doing something really stupid for a really long time.

“Holy fuck,” Oikawa says as they enter campus, and pulls up short. Hajime leans around him. He freezes.

There, not fifty feet away, just off the path and for all of UCLA and the Olympiad and the world to see, are Kageyama and his little spiker.

Kageyama has his back to a tree, body curving gently downwards, eyes closed. Hinata is on his tiptoes, both hands on Kageyama’s shoulders. They’re kissing. Hesitantly, with one of Kageyama’s long hands cupping Hinata’s jaw, both their faces flushed and intent.

Hajime’s vertigo is suddenly worse, far worse, leaving him unbalanced and shaky as he watches Kageyama smile sweetly against Hinata’s mouth, one hand inching into his hair, the other circling his waist. Hinata smiles back. His hands tighten in the fabric of Kageyama’s Team Japan shirt.

“Oh my god it’s really happening,” Oikawa says, voice quiet and face rapturous. “Look at them. Fukao owes me like three million yen. Oh my god.”

“Oikawa, don’t. We shouldn’t—”

“This is where he’s been going, Iwa-chan! He’s been running around getting some! You were right! How dare you!”

Hajime thinks he’s wrong. He thinks this is the first time Hinata and Kageyama have ever kissed. They look scared, and like they’ve achieved something. Hinata is talking now, or maybe laughing something into Kageyama’s chest. Hajime doesn’t want to see this. His mouth feels dry, too small for his tongue.

“Ohhh, he’s going to hate me,” Oikawa grins, and Hajime snaps back to attention.

“You piece of shit,” Hajime starts, latching a hand to the back of Oikawa’s shirt, “I swear to god if you—”

 _“Tooooooobio-chaaaaaaaan, how could youuuuuuu_ oh my god he’s so mad. Iwa-chan he’s so mad.”

“Fucker, _run,”_ Hajime hisses, dragging Oikawa into the crowd as Kageyama and Hinata’s shocked, reddening faces vanish behind a gaggle of Indonesians and Oikawa’s delighted laughter carries them up and into the Village. The crowd swallows them happily, Oikawa grabbing up Hajime’s hand to tow them around a knot of drunken basketball players and Hajime lets him, holding tight to Oikawa’s palm, breathing shakily through his mouth.

The Village is wild, alight with men and women and drinks and noise. Hajime can’t hear it. He barely sees it. The line between Kageyama’s brows as he’d leaned into Hinata. Hinata’s flushed face when he’d spun around. Oikawa’s grin when he’d heckled them. Oikawa’s grin in the last set of the morning’s game. Oikawa’s grin as they sat on their asses on a golf course. Oikawa’s grin at the arrivals gate. Oikawa’s grin when they were in college. When they were in high school. When they were twenty-two, seventeen, fifteen, twelve, _six._

_I want—_

“The Americans—” Oikawa gasps ahead of him, “The Americans must have won gold in something tonight, look! This place is insane!”

It’s just color. Color and light and a pounding drone that sounds like joy to Hajime’s ears and makes him feel like he’s going to be sick. Oikawa’s face, warm and smiling softly on the golf course, in their old apartment, Oikawa’s hand between his shoulders in high school, his hand around Hajime’s here, right this second, his face at this moment, open and joyful, Hajime—

Hajime’s mouth is open, sound forced from his throat before he even understands what it is that he’s trying to say, that he’s even trying to say something at all. “Oikawa—” he manages, low and strangled, and Oikawa turns, the mess of humanity splitting around them like a river and its rocks.

Their hands are knotted between them.

“Iwa-chan, did you—?” Hajime eyes are on Oikawa’s mouth, the faint ghost of a tooth behind smiling lips. He feels too hot. There’s no wind, the bodies too close together for such movement, but he can feel it through his hair, between his fingers. He looks up.

Oikawa is staring at him. Their hands are knotted between them. Oikawa’s throat bobs before his lips part. “Iwaizumi,” he says, voice low, eyes too dark to read. Hajime swallows, and grips Oikawa’s hand until he can feel the bones mash.

The party is too loud to be strictly heard, too dense to be exactly seen. Someone’s heel digs into Hajime’s toes as they stumble by.

Oikawa’s eyes are on him. Oikawa leans in and kisses his mouth.

It’s gentle until it’s abruptly, immediately not, Oikawa’s hands hot on Hajime’s cheeks, behind his jaw, Oikawa’s tongue pressing insistently into his mouth until Hajime parts his lips and lets him in. Hajime is shoved against Oikawa’s chest by someone moving behind them and finds his hand’s in Oikawa’s shirt, tongue moving wetly against Oikawa’s but mostly just trying to breathe. Oikawa is a force unto himself. His teeth find Hajime’s lip and Hajime groans like it’s been ripped out of him.

“Not here,” Oikawa says when he pulls back, leaving Hajime glassy-eyed and heaving for breath. “Come on.”

He doesn’t pull them far, just enough to separate them from the flow of bodies through the plaza. There’s the tan stucco wall of a dorm building and then Hajime’s thrown against it, Oikawa kissing his mouth then his jaw then sucking hard at his neck. Hajime, crowded against the plaster, gasps. He tangles a hand in the fine hair at the back of Oikawa’s head and tries hard not to pull. When he does anyways, Oikawa moans against his throat and applies teeth.

It’s unreal. All of it. Hajime feels drunk, except being drunk was never so vivid. The pain of Oikawa’s fingers around his arm is startling, his back and shoulders pressed flat and scraping against the wall. He hasn’t kissed anyone in an embarrassingly long time, and he’s never kissed anyone like this, where he’s not sure he’ll be left standing afterwards. Oikawa is consuming, and Hajime feels like he could live off this, off whatever it is Oikawa’s made of that he’s forcing into Hajime with teeth and tongue.

The sensation of Oikawa on him, against his mouth, is _incredible_ but Hajime’s losing track. His heart is tight in his chest. The noise from the Village around them is still deafening, an indeterminate roar that swallows all meaning, and Hajime feels it too sharply. He can’t think and he suddenly realizes he needs to, because Oikawa won’t, and someone has to, and this feels like a dream but dreams can’t last and you have to wake _up—_

“Fuck,” he gasps, pulling back, and Oikawa tries to follow him until Hajime turns his face away. “I’m sorry,” he says, “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” Oikawa murmurs, voice low and sweet. He’s kissing the corner of Hajime’s mouth. They’re too close together, Hajime can’t see any shape of him except the lidded light of his eye.

“I shouldn’t have—” Hajime says, stumbles, because he wants this, he’s thinking he’s maybe never wanted much of anything as much as he wants this, but not at the risk of— “We just started talking again, we can’t— We’re _friends_.”

Oikawa stops. His lips on Hajime’s jaw disappear. When Hajime looks, Oikawa is staring at him, panting, eyes searching. His mouth is red and wet. Hajime barely recognizes him.

Hajime opens his mouth to say something, to, to maybe plead with him not to be stupid about this, but Oikawa surges forward, wrapping his hands over Hajime’s cheeks. It’s a rough kiss, closed-mouth and bruising, and then Oikawa pulls back. _“Fuck!”_ he laughs, eyes screwed shut. His cheeks are pink.

And then he’s gone.

The outside world hits Hajime like a hammer, still too loud and bright and now too cold, too cold even in the desert in the summer, and Hajime pushes himself forward but Oikawa isn’t there. The crowds have swallowed him whole. Athletes surge past, all tall and beautiful and handsome, but not a one of them Oikawa, not a one of them with that smile.

Hajime is suddenly alone among the bodies, lips still warm, heart heavy and plummeting into the earth.

 

* * *

 

He wakes up in the morning. He experiences regret. It’s pretty crushing.

Hajime rolls over and buries his face in the mattress.

Oikawa kissed him last night. Fact. Hajime kissed him back. Also, unfortunately, fact. These were bad things that should not have happened. Definitely fact.

...Right?

Hajime, on the whole, likes to think of himself as a pretty solid guy. He takes shit as its comes, he deals with what has to be dealt with, he rolls into bed in generally the same mood as he rolls out of it. The memory of Oikawa pressed against him, though, a wide, wide smile Hajime could feel with his own lips, that’s destabilizing. And Hajime’s memories of himself, of how much he’d _wanted_ in those short, delirious minutes, those make him feel like he’s hovering with one foot over a very tall cliff.

Hajime gets out of bed, masturbates furiously in the shower, and heads for the stadium.

It’s the semifinals, Japan vs. Greece, and the game’s already ten minutes into the second set by the time Hajime forces his way into the stands. The stands are packed, everyone eager to see who’ll face the Australians in the gold medal match, and Hajime keeps his head down as he makes his way over feet and around knees to Akaashi and Hinata. Natsumi isn't with them, probably being spoiled rotten by one of the wives back at the hotel.

There’s a whistle, and a cheer, as someone scores a point. Hajime focuses elsewhere.

He hadn’t found Oikawa in the crowds, and when he’d made it back to the rooms his door had been closed and Hajime had been too coward to knock. He sits down with a thump next to Hinata.

“Iwaizumi-san!” Hinata says, voice shrill, face scarlet, and oh yes, now Hajime remembers what else happened last night. That anything else happened last night. He rubs a knuckle between his eyes.

“Good morning, Hinata,” he says. God, he sounds rough. “Congratulations. Sorry about Oikawa.”

“Why are we congratulating Hinata?” Akaashi asks, peering around from the shrimp’s other side.

“Kageyama and Hinata hooked up last night,” Hajime replies. Hinata squeaks.

“Oh,” says Akaashi, as Hajime finally looks towards the court. “Well, congratulations. Are you two dating now?”

Japan’s in the lead. If Hinata squeaks again, it’s too high for human hearing.

“Maybe?” he says, after a very nervous and red-faced moment, and Hajime abruptly stops paying attention. Akaashi asks a gentle, encouraging question. Hajime leans over his knees with one hand across his mouth.

He feels hungover. Last night he’d felt drunk. It’s all the same sickness. He’d kissed Oikawa because he’d been, what? Caught up in at all? The anarchy of the Village’s party? They’d passed two swimmers, one on his knees, badly hidden by a water feature on their way through the plazas. The one getting his dick sucked had still had his goggles around his neck. Hajime remembers it starkly. He’d been caught up in it. Oikawa had always been good-looking, Hajime may have known him since he still ate his boogers, but he isn’t _blind—_ and Hajime...

There’s a roar from the crowds. Hajime looks from the back of some dude’s head in front of him and sees Oikawa land from his serve. His smile is neat, his footing precise. Hajime knows without thinking that he’s hyperfocused and didn’t sleep, that he’s going to crash after the game. Used to be, Hajime would shove some carbs in his mouth and make sure he was at least adjacent to a bed before his legs gave out, but last night Oikawa’s hand had crept under Hajime’s shirt, pressed like a furnace over his hip.

Hajime closes his eyes. He’s wanted Oikawa for a long, long time. He may not have realized until last night, but denying it now would be beyond stupid. He wants Oikawa, he wants Oikawa’s hands on him, he wants his mouth. His mother would be appalled. _Oikawa’s_ mother would be appalled. Once Oikawa got the physical act of fucking out of his system, what would he even think of Hajime? Of the fact that Hajime wants this in a way that’s starting to freak him out the longer he considers it?

Not just Oikawa’s hands on his body, but maybe just Oikawa. Watching movies with him. Getting takeout with him. Everything they used to do together as friends, except in the clear understanding that when the movie is over and the takeout stuffed in the fridge Hajime will climb into bed and Oikawa will climb in beside him and they’ll fall asleep in a tangled, grumpy mess of limbs and when Hajime wakes up in the morning Oikawa will still be there.

With him.

“We’re _friends,”_ Hajime says into his palm. “We just got back to being _friends.”_

“Iwaizumi?”

He looks up. The second set’s over, 25-12 Japan. A rout, just like the first.

“Are you alright?” Akaashi asks. There’s poorly-hidden concern in his features.

“Fine,” Hajime replies, voice hard, clapping his hands together as he sits back in his seat. Hinata has disappeared at some point, must have stepped over Akaashi rather than Hajime to get out of the way, and Hajime rolls the stiffness out of his neck. Time to think about anything else.

Akaashi makes a choking noise.

“Good god, were you mauled by a _bear?”_

Hajime slaps a hand to his collar. The hickey. He forgot about the hickey.

“It’s nothing,” he says immediately.

“It was Oikawa,” Akaashi says, sounding a little staggered. His even gaze is threatening to ripple.

“Akaashi—”

“Is that what Hinata was talking about?” Akaashi asks, his tone the closest to snappish Hajime’s ever heard from him, “Seeing the two of you together last night?””

“It’s not—” Hajime says, stumbling for an answer, and then he swallows. Denial won’t fucking save him. He’s well past that. He grips the sides of his seat tight with both hands.

“He kissed me last night.” Plastic cuts into his palms. “We—we kissed last night. It didn’t go any farther than that.”

“Lord,” Akaashi mutters, and then something quieter Hajime doesn’t catch as he scrubs a hand over his mouth.

“What?”

“I said, I’m going to be owed for this,” he sighs. “Who screwed it up?”

Hajime rankles at the wording, but it’s more reflex than real distaste. ‘Screwed up’ seems like such a forgiving phrase, honestly.

“Me, I guess,” he says, as the third set begins. Greece serves first. “It was stupid, okay. It—it shouldn’t have happened at all. It’s only been like a week since we started talking again. I shouldn’t have gone and kissed him back just because, I don’t know, everyone else was doing it. He’s my best friend in the world, for better or worse, and...”

He pauses. Akaashi is staring at him.

“You didn’t say this to him,” Akaashi says. It’s a very flat kind of question.

“Uh, yeah?” Akaashi’s giving him a look and Hajime cannot claim to understand it. There’s a cheer as Japan scores. “He left after I did, but, I don’t know, maybe he came to his senses, or, ha, realized there was probably easier tail to be had. He’s never had a hard time finding someone with a nice face to get him off.”

He says the words, he heard them in his head and he said them, and still they make him feel like vomiting. Strange.

“Iwaizumi…” Akaashi starts, looking pained.

“I mean, he ran away,” Hajime says. He tries to laugh because it’s funny, really, Oikawa leaving him in the dust in search of a willing hookup, even though there had been something wrong in Oikawa’s face before he’d vanished, something crumpled and small, but he can’t. His chest is oddly tight, like he can’t get back any of the air he’s shakily exhaling. “That’s what he did. And he only would have done that because I didn’t want to sleep with him, right? I mean, what other reason could there be?”

It wasn’t supposed to come out so pleading. Another high roar of a cheer moves through the stands. Point for Japan. Akaashi props his chin in his hand and stares ahead of him.

“God,” he says through his fingers. It’s getting harder to see the court. Fans are getting to their feet as the whistles come faster, point after point after rally after point. “I’m sorry. It should really be Hanamaki or Matsukawa doing this. I never had much of a stake in it. But obviously whatever was supposed to happen hasn’t, and, ha—”

Akaashi casts a glance up, as if to see where they are, in the stadium, at the Olympics, an ocean away from home. Hajime watches him fixedly, without control. There’s a whine in his ears unrelated to the game or the fans.

“Iwaizumi,” Akaashi says, “He loves you.”

The screech of the whistle. A man in the stands, not far from them, shouting a player’s name. The whine in his ears, cresting higher and higher and higher.

Hajime laughs.

“What?” he says. “No, he doesn’t.”

Akaashi looks at him. His fingers— long, crooked, ex-setter fingers, hide his mouth.

“Not like that. He would have,” Hajime says, stumbling over it even though it’s a simple thing, it’s easy, it’s not _real,_ “He would have told me. It’s Oikawa. He tells me everything— _told_ me everything.”

There’s something wrong with his voice. With his hands, white and maybe shaking, still gripping the edge of his seat. There’s a flash of orange in the crowd, Hinata making his way back towards them.

“Iwaizumi…” Akaashi says, not unkindly, but Hajime shakes his head roughly.

“No, he would have told me,” he snaps, knowing it’s true, that if this real he would have known, he would have seen it, Oikawa wouldn’t have just lived with it like some unsightly relative you never mention at parties, pretending it would go away on its own, pretending that he didn’t want hands, or, or mouths, or waking up in the morning with—

He stops.

September. It had been September, the guy with the stud in his ear, some gray morning in September.

“Oh fucking christ,” Hajime moans, and buries his face in his white-knuckled hands.

Akaashi makes a questioning noise. It’s nearly lost to the stadium’s clamor. The Greek team isn’t going to survive whatever Oikawa’s doing to them.

“He walked in on me,” Hajime says. A gray September morning, clouded-over even as it clung to the last of the summer heat. They’d slept on top of the covers. “The year after the Tokyo games. I’d thought he wasn’t home that morning, but he walked in on me.”

Hajime had woken up when the door opened. He hadn’t seen Oikawa’s face.

“With someone?”

He’d yelled and rolled off the bed, grabbing for the covers, as the guy with the earring had flushed and thrown a pillow over himself. He hadn’t seen Oikawa’s face. Just heard him as he’d laughed and closed the door again. Hadn’t he sounded normal? Hadn’t he sounded himself?

“Some—fuck, some guy I met at a bar. I don't even remember his name.”

Yamato. He’d never laughed at the right place in Hajime’s jokes, but he'd been sweet. He’d bought Hajime a beer.

“Oikawa walked in on us,” he says, letting his hands hang in the space between his knees, staring at the floor between his shoes, feeling shaken-out and dulled, “And then in the spring he moved out. And after he moved out—”

_tragicly i will be away that week for hot + sexy training camp. we gotta catch up tho!_

_sorry iwachan emergency practice sesh with the team. have to do drinks some other time_

_can’t, have to go see my parents before the away tour_

_have a conflict but say hi to them for me_

_sorry maybe another time_

_can’t maybe next month_

_no_

_sorry_

“He started pulling away,” Akaashi says, “To protect himself.”

 _Yes,_ mouths Hajime. He feels flattened. He feels like he hasn’t slept in days. “Because he was hurt,” he says aloud. “Because I was hurting him.”

“Iwaizumi…” Akaashi says again, he’s said Hajime’s name so often in that tone today, god Hajime’s growing to hate that tone, and he shakes Akaashi’s hand off his arm with a ragged laugh.

“Fuck!” he smiles, forcing it out of himself. “He loves me!”

Oikawa loves him.

 

 

 

 

It is, in hindsight, perfectly, painfully obvious.

God, Hajime’s a jackass.

“He loves me.” His voice is softer now. Akaashi has to lean in to hear. “Fuck.”

He brought guys back to their apartment. He shrugged Oikawa off at the airport. He kissed Oikawa then insisted that they were just friends.

Hinata is back, up on his feet, cheering wildly at something happening on the court. Hajime stares fixedly at the floor of the stands, tugging methodically at his own fingers.

Who in their right mind would forgive that kind of bullshit?

“Akaashi,” he says, pitching his voice perforce over the rising chants of the audience, “What do I do?”

Akaashi blinks. “Excuse me?” A knee jostles Hajime as the fan next to him jumps to his feet, whooping.

“He must hate me after this, I can't just—”

Akaashis looks appalled. “Iwaizumi, are you kidding me, you—”

“Look!” Hinata shouts, one arm pointed straight towards court. His face is tight, his eyes wide.

Hajime looks up.

 

* * *

 

Iwaizumi wasn’t in the stands that morning.

Tooru doesn’t want to think about it. He doesn’t want to think about any of it.

And so he doesn’t.

“Nice receive!” he shouts as Fukao dives, catching the serve with his hand pressed flat to the parquet. The ball arcs up and away and Tooru squares himself under it, shouting the play.

What a joy playing international games. No one knows your language.

Bokuto rushes the net, feet planted, arms back, and _up_ , and Tooru tosses to Nakamura. The Greek defense splits, and Nakamura drives it home. Whistle, point, 24-22 Japan in the third set. A smile rips across Tooru’s face as his team whoops, immediately swallowed by the roar of the crowds, and he slaps Nakamura hard between the shoulders.

Nakamura is laughing. So is Bokuto, and Shimaoka as he gets ready to serve. It’s tight, tighter than the first two sets, but they’re going to do this. They’re going to win today. They’re going to win today, they’re going to win tomorrow, they’re going to get gold.

Whatever else has crashed and burned in Tooru’s life, whatever else has left him wanting since he was thirteen years old and terrified of being told “no,” this he can do. This they can win.

“Watch number six,” he calls as they take position. His fingers ache and he had the misfortune to get a whiff of his own armpit earlier. It was disgusting. He feels like he could conquer a continent. “He’s favoring his left side, he banged something in that dive.”

“Yes, sir!” Fukao laughs, and Shimaoka lines up the serve.

It blasts across the court, the Greek libero just barely catching it, and Minami blocks their returning spike easily. Number six, wincing, gets under it.

“They’re going to dump!” Tooru shouts as their setter shifts back, and then it goes setter to Minami to Shimaoka to Bokuto, like a bolt of lightning, slamming it down over the net.

Tooru grins. Bokuto once sprained a reporter’s finger when shaking his hand. No one’s going to receive that.

The Greeks, by the tips of their ace’s fingers, receive it.

Tooru swears and calls Minami forward. He’s already running. “This is our point!” he shouts to the team. “Don’t let them have this!”

The ball was wild but the Greeks get it under control, something steely in the way they move. Their players on the bench are shouting. “Get ready!” Bokuto roars.

It’s a feint. Tooru should have seen it coming. Number five sets, back arched to follow the ball, number two feigns a spike, and then number eight, that wing spiker they pulled off the bench five points ago, slams it. You can hear the damn echo.

Fukao gets under it, barely, but it’s wild, arcing towards the stands, and Tooru won’t fucking have this. Not this time. Not these games.

“Go! _Go!”_ the Japanese bench is shouting as Tooru runs, heart pounding, legs aching, and throws himself into the air just inside the line.

He turns, twisting against his own motion, and this is familiar, isn’t it. He’s done this before. A very long time ago.

The ball slams into his hands, makes his taped fingers pulse, and rockets back towards court. The noise in the stadium is deafening, louder than any game he’s played since 2020. Bokuto meets his eye, plants his feet.

Tooru realizes, as the ball sails for Bokuto, sails for the point they’re about to seize with both hands from the Greeks, that he’s miscalculated. He’s not going to get his feet under him before he lands. He’s going to hit.

It all moves slowly. Him in the air, the ball soaring away from him, trying to force his legs into position, don’t land on your back, don’t land on your ribs, one foot extended, the other still coming, and when he looks up he sees, with Hinata and Akaashi and the rest of the families all pointing and gaping, Iwaizumi in the stands.

Karasuno. This happened in high school, against Karasuno.

Maybe you only get lucky once.

His right foot hits the ground. His knee goes _pop_. Tooru screams.

 

* * *

 

“—Down by the home locker room!”

“That was his bad knee,” Hajime says. The stadium’s in an uproar.

Oikawa’s on the ground. People are running towards him.

“Iwaizumi!”

He turns. Akaashi is staring at him, one arm stretched out behind him. “They’re going to take him through the southwest entrance, by the home locker room. That way!”

He’s pointing. Hajime goes.

It’s a struggle out of the seats, tangles of other people’s feet and knees, and it’s a struggle up the stairs and down them again, back down to the concourse he and Oikawa ran through, remembering what _fucking_ direction southwest is, but when he rounds the corner on the ground level, there everyone is. The coach looking furious, someone from the judging table, someone from the IOC, a reporter being chased off, two paramedics, and Oikawa, being carried on a stretcher between them.

“Oikawa,” he shouts, keeping pace with the group, his voice alien to his ears, and Oikawa’s head turns. His face is red, his cheeks wet with tears.

“Hajime,” he pants, eyes clouded and wild. “Hajime.”

The IOC woman stops him when Hajime lurches forward, shouting English Hajime doesn’t have the focus to understand, but Oikawa snaps something back, teeth bared, and then Hajime’s through, running alongside them. Oikawa seizes his hand.

“It’s over,” he says, voice cracking, eyes fixed on Hajime’s. His other hand reaches towards the red mass of his knee. “It’s over. I’m over. I’m done.”

“It’ll be okay,” Hajime replies, trying to keep Oikawa’s gaze, trying to keep up. “You’ll be okay.”

They pass through the doors of the stadium, out into the weak-starred night and the lights of the road, and Oikawa’s eyes slide from Hajime’s to his knee. He’s starting to go pale, his hand tightening around Hajime’s until the bones begin to mash.

“I’m done,” he says. One of the paramedics is waving his arm, flagging down the ambulance. Hajime can’t think of what to say. They’ve done this before, he still can’t think of what to say.

“I’m done,” says Oikawa. “I’m done.”

 

* * *

 

Hajime wakes up on the floor of Oikawa’s room in the Olympic Village, a pillow crammed under his neck, blankets tangled between his legs.

Oikawa is in his bed, breathing evenly. His right knee, a rough wrap of bandages halfway between hip and ankle, is propped on a careful construction of pillows.

His eyes are closed, but he’s not asleep. Hajime wonders if he slept at all.

He’ll need surgery. That had been the conclusion. No dislocation, no damage to the arteries, but his ACL was torn and the cartilage was fucked. Too many years of blocks and serves. Too few of anything else. So a flight home, weeks of physical therapy, and then reconstructive surgery.

Oikawa had asked only once, near the beginning, if he’d play again. The answer was vague, an apologetic maybe, a “You’ll have to see how surgery goes,” and Oikawa hadn’t asked a second time.

At some point during the night, somewhere between the x-rays and the MRIs, Oikawa had let go of Hajime’s hand. By the time they asked Oikawa if he’d prefer to stay the night at the hospital or sleep at the Village, explaining kindly that there was nothing more they could do here, he wasn’t looking at Hajime at all. He barely looked at Hajime again.

Hajime looks at him now.

Oikawa’s hair is flat against his skull, the dark smudges under his eyes pronounced. In the bright, bounding light of a Los Angeles morning, the lines around his eyes and mouth are struck in sharp relief. His jaw moves minutely as he chews at the inside of his lip.

Hajime loves him. By the looks of it, he’s loved him for years. It makes his heart do something thundering in his chest.

Too bad it doesn’t matter. Too bad about torn ligaments and meniscal damage and the dull look on Oikawa’s face as they’d pointed to the x-rays.

They love each other, but something else has come up.

Hajime’s phone buzzes, on the carpet not far from his head, and he reaches for it wearily. He’d called his mom last night, and Oikawa’s mom, whose frenzy for her son had been tempered by an apparently sincere joy to speak with Hajime again, bless her, and then he’d texted Hanamaki and Matsukawa. He didn’t tell them about the kiss, but he figures it’s not long before they find out. Maybe Akaashi will tell them. Seems Makki and Mattsun have known a lot more about Hajime than Hajime ever has, anyways.

There’s a text from his mom, which he replies to, and one from Oikawa’s mom, asking him if he can make Oikawa call her. She used to do the same thing in college, and Hajime suspects he’ll have about the same luck now as he did then, but he doesn’t tell her that. He’ll try his hardest, he promises her.

When he looks up, Oikawa’s eyes are open.

“Hey,” Hajime says. His voice is creaky with sleep.

Oikawa doesn’t turn his head.

“Your mom texted me again. Are you gonna call her?”

Oikawa’s thumb is dragging methodically across the thin dorm sheets. He inhales, still staring at the ceiling. “What time is it?” he asks. His voice is toneless.

Hajime looks at him, and then he looks away. “A little after ten,” he says. They slept late. Or rather, Hajime slept late.

Oikawa will have lain flat on his back, awake, alone with his thoughts, for a night and dawn and morning’s worth of hours.

Hajime’s fingers dig faint pits into the flat gray carpet.

“I’m going to the game,” Oikawa says. He’s pushing himself upright, moving carefully. He doesn’t make any small sounds of pain, but Hajime can see the effort that costs him.

“You sure that’s a good idea?” It’s a perfunctory question and it doesn’t get a response. Last night, Oikawa’s point won Japan the semifinal. They’re playing the gold medal match this morning.

They’re playing it without Oikawa.

Oikawa swings his legs over the side of the bed and, with a barely visible hesitation, sets his heels on the ground. Hajime watches warily as Oikawa tenses, rises, and swallows a gasp as he thumps back onto the bed. Hajime stands and grabs his crutches from their spot beside the door, holding them out at arm’s length. Oikawa breathes for several long moments and then takes them, careful not to let his fingers touch Hajime’s.

He gets off the bed easily on the second try. He’s practiced with crutches.

They don’t talk while they move around the room, Hajime using the shower down the hall first, then Oikawa. Hajime leans against the wall outside the bathroom while Oikawa washes, head resting against the plaster, listening for a fall, and is back in his own room pulling on a shirt by the time Oikawa hobbles out.

They don't talk as they wait for the elevator. They don't talk as they proceed, slowly, down the path in the stadium. Hajime offers a hand only once, when Oikawa’s crutch catches on a break in the pavement, and Oikawa flinches from him bodily, mouth twisted. Hajime shoves his hands in his pockets and watches Oikawa from the corner of his eye.

He looks beautiful, even tired and pained and vacant-eyed. It’s like Hajime can’t go back to a time before he knew this. He wants nothing so much as to sit on a couch with him, ice his knee, touch him and talk to him until he comes back again, becomes himself again.

Not that that’s a useful thought. They enter the stadium.

The noise is intense, the match already underway, and Oikawa and Hajime emerge courtside just as Australia slams a service ace through the Japanese front line. The scoreboard shows that Japan won the first set, but Australia’s won the second and it’s going to win the third.

Hajime pauses a moment at the stairs into the lowest section of the stands, thinking Oikawa might want to watch this one from a distance, but Oikawa keeps going, swinging forward in his old band shirt and sweatpants and single flip-flop, and catches the attention of the Japanese bench.

The team swarms him immediately, the starting players joining in as the Australians finally take the set, and Hajime hangs back as Oikawa is engulfed by their attentions. Hands grasp his arms, clap to his shoulders, always careful, exceedingly gentle, and Oikawa smiles thin as paper, answering all questions with vague, uplifting lies. The team takes their comfort regardless. Their lucky charm returned to them, even minus a usable limb and most of his heart. When the coach calls them over, yelling about the time they’re wasting even as he offers Oikawa a sympathetic grimace that Oikawa seems to ignore, a few still linger, reluctant to let their captain out of sight again.

Bokuto is one of the last to go. He speaks quietly to Oikawa, one hand squeezing his elbow as Hajime comes up behind them. Hajime can only see a thin sliver of Oikawa’s expression, but “false cheer and a lie in his mouth” is familiar even at an angle. Bokuto catches Hajime’s eye over Oikawa’s shoulder.

“You’ll be fine, yeah?” he says, clapping his hand a last time to Oikawa’s arm and winking obviously at Hajime. “We’re all just glad you’re here. Means a lot, huh?”

“Of course, Bokuto-chan,” Oikawa says, and his tone is almost painful to the ear, he’s so forcing himself into his normal lilt. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

Bokuto smiles ruefully, an expression Hajime’s uncertain he’s ever seen on him before, and looks to Hajime one more time before jogging off. Hajime and Oikawa are left standing on the sidelines as the fourth set starts and Hajime grabs two chairs from the line forming the bench. He drags them a foot away from the rest of the team, and sits in one, waiting, watching the players get into position, until Oikawa lowers himself into the other.

Sixteen points go by in silence (and ten for Australia). Team Japan seems energized by Oikawa’s return, hitting harder, playing smarter, the crowd booming with every spike and serve, and Oikawa watches with tight lips, one hand just above his knee, the other holding onto his crutches. Hajime can only pick out every other word from the English announcers, but they sound fired up, delighted with what they’re watching.

Kageyama’s playing setter. He’s doing well.

Over the speakers: “—ɐup ʇɥǝ ıuɔɹǝpıqןǝ ɥoʇsɥoʇ _Tobio Kageyama_ sǝızǝs ʇɥǝ ןǝɐp ɟoɹ _Japan,_ pıp ʎon sǝǝ ʇɥǝ doʍǝɹ ou _that serve!”_

The muscles in Oikawa’s forearm bunch as he digs his fingers into his thigh.

Hajime guesses his idea up until now had been to let Oikawa take the lead. Oikawa whose knee was ruined, Oikawa who’d spent his life in love with a guy too fucking stupid to know he loved him back—whatever sucking abyss of an issue he wanted to discuss first, Hajime would go along with it. Turns out this was wrong, though, because Oikawa’s plan for the foreseeable future is to think himself into a pit and never climb out.

Not without cause, but still.

“Oikawa—” Hajime starts, the first time he’s spoken in over an hour, and Oikawa inhales like he’s been struck.

“Don't,” he snaps, still staring fixedly ahead of him as Ikeda slams down another point. “Don't start, I don't care.”

Hajime sighs, scrubbing one hand through his hair. “Look, it’s not—”

“I said, _don’t._ There’s nothing to say.” His lips are pulled back from his teeth, his shoulders hunched. Anger is an emotion, at least. It’s a reaction.

“This doesn’t have to be the end,” Hajime continues, insistent, staring at Oikawa’s face in profile. “You could still play again, you’re still world-ranked, you’re still an Olympian—”

“No, I’m the fuckup who snapped his ligament in the semis and left the _prodigy_ to clean up my mess!”

It’s not even a surprise.

“Are you fucking—” Hajime starts, but getting angry won’t help no matter how many layers of stupid this is, so he cuts himself off and exhales.

A rally point and then an ace for Japan. Bokuto’s hollering from midcourt.

“You’re not a fuckup for injuring yourself,” Hajime says, voice low under the noise of the crowds, leaning in to be heard. Oikawa still won’t look at him. “You were unlucky, and I’m sorry. But you didn’t fail, you didn’t let them down, you got them to the _gold medal match of the Olympics_. That was _you._ And as for Kageyama, jesus, I can’t believe we’re still talking about Kageyama—”

It was the wrong thing to say, except for how it finally makes Oikawa round on him, eyes flashing, mouth bitter and cruel. “Fuck you,” he laughs, drawing himself up tall. His smile is entirely teeth. “Don’t talk like you know me. We haven’t been friends in years.”

It hurts, but it was supposed to. It’s not even entirely untrue. Hajime grabs him by the bicep anyways and snarls.

“I know you well e-fucking-nough,” Hajime says. “At the very least I know what you look like. I know how you play.”

He throws an arm out, pointing to the net. Kageyama’s still on court, his back is to them, his hands rising in that diamond shape.

“He’s here because you taught him, in one way or another, every fucking year since middle school. He’s here because he plays like _you.”_

Oikawa stares at him. It’s not the truest thing Hajime’s ever said. Kageyama is his own man, has had his own life, and he’s doubtlessly quicker than Oikawa, with a better instinct for where the ball is going and how to get it there. But the bones of his style, how he moves and when he does it, that’s familiar. That’s got a flair Hajime knows.

“He still uses your jump serve, for fuck’s sake,” Hajime sighs, and releases Oikawa’s arm. Oikawa watches him warily, like a rock that’s learned to bite. “They all play like you. Can’t you see that? They’re here not just because you physically won them that game last night, but because you’re captain. Because you’ve been their captain since you were all practicing for the qualifiers. Jesus, just look.”

Surprisingly, Oikawa does. They both do. Japan’s five points from taking the fourth set and the team’s playing cohesively, passing seamlessly, arcing the ball from player to player with the obvious certainty that everyone’s going to be wherever the fuck they need to be to make this one happen.

That’s familiar, too. Japan scores twice, and Australia once more, before Oikawa speaks again.

“I just—” he says, and his voice isn’t so harsh anymore. When Hajime looks, his fist is folded in the leg of his sweatpants, and his throat works before he talks. “I just needed this one. I needed this.”

“You have it,” Hajime says. “You got it.”

“No, I’m on the bench,” Oikawa says in that voice Hajime remembers, like he’s explaining to a child. “Kageyama is setting. And before you jump down my throat,” another bitter smile, smaller this time, “Yes, it hurts worse because it's him. I can't help it at this point. But it would have hurt with anyone. This was my year. It was my last chance. I was going to lead them to gold.”

Oikawa seems to have deflated, shoulders slumping, no more anger to prop him up or furious control to keep him rigid. It’s horrifying to Hajime, how he suddenly looks small.

“You still will,” he insists as the ball goes sailing off court, bounced clean off an Australian’s botched receive, and half the stadium erupts into wild cheers. Japan’s won the fourth set, dragged Australia into a fifth, and Oikawa only smiles again, like Hajime doesn’t get the joke.

“Nobody’s going to remember the captain who couldn’t stay uninjured long enough to make it to the final match,” and Hajime’s about to tear his hair out as the sidelines erupt with activity, the team grabbing water and arguing plays before they file back out, more than a few of them shooting glances Oikawa’s way. Oikawa offers a distracted wave, smiles thinly.

“You’re missing my point,” Hajime says as the whistle blows and Minami lines up his serve. “Or maybe I’m fucking this up, I don’t know, wouldn’t be a first, but, listen—”

Whistle already, first point to Japan. The Australians look ragged, their blockers breathing heavy. Oikawa’s knee knocks Hajime’s when he stretches out his other leg.

“It’s not—” Hajime starts, insistent, needing to make Oikawa understand, “It’s not going to matter ten years from now whether you played this game or, god, if you ever played any game ever again, Oikawa, you’re a _genius_. You’re the smartest, most single-mindedly dedicated person I have ever met, and I think if you decided to be fucking prime minister of Mars they’d find you up there with a rocket ship and a fucking campaign slogan, it’s—”

He’s getting away from his point. Hajime cuts off, nearly laughing, and Oikawa’s looking at him now, full on, something unreadable in his eyes. Hajime looks down at his hands, at the deformation of skin as he presses his thumb into his palm, at the parquet below them.

“People are going to love you the rest of your life,” he tells Oikawa. “They’re going to love you, and, ha, they’re going to fear you, and just like Kageyama and fucking half the rest of the pro players in the world, they’re going to try their hardest to be you. Whatever the fuck it is you’re doing. Whoever you decide to be. Athlete, astronaut, prime minister, whatever. There’s just— there’s more to you than volleyball, man. There always has been.”

Hajime looks up. Oikawa is staring at him, mouth half-open.

Another whistle, another roar from the crowds. The Japanese players in Hajime’s periphery are jumping to their feet, cheering and stomping.

Hajime had had this plan, see, that he wouldn’t bring up the feelings thing until they’d at least dedicated a couple hours to the knee thing. Because love is important, but so is Oikawa’s career and health and ever-treacherous sense of self-worth, and so Hajime thought he’d just… hold out a bit. Until the world settled some.

Except the way Oikawa’s looking at him, a shocked, small, quickly-blooming something in his face, makes Hajime think he didn’t do as good a job keeping a hold of himself as he’d planned.

“Iwaizumi,” Oikawa says, facing Hajime, game forgotten even as the Australians let another point land, and another, “Iwaizumi, what are you saying.”

Hajime feels himself flushing. “That you’re smart and good at shit, I don’t know—”

“No, no, I got that, I’m incredible and perfect,” Oikawa says, waving it off, and Hajime grins, suddenly and fiercely, feeling like a hole’s been filled in his chest, “but you have to tell me what you’re saying.” His voice sounds measured and but his eyes are wide. “You have to tell me the truth.”

Hajime’s realizes he’s still smiling. He can’t stop it. He thinks if he spoke now it would all come out in a flood, every moment and memory and can of shitty vending machine soda they ever fought over.

The smack of Kageyama’s hand against the ball, the music of the fans, the triumphant howls of the team.

“Hajime,” Oikawa says, gripping his hand.

“I love you, too,” Hajime says. “Just, totally gone. Sorry it took so long.”

Oikawa’s staring at Hajime in shock, in shining, red-rimmed awe.

“I—” he says.

And then the whistle sounds twice, shortly, and the stadium fucking explodes.

“Holy shit,” Oikawa says, tearing his gaze away, barely audible through the cheering and the screaming and the amped howl of the announcers. “Holy shit we _won?”_

15-2 Japan.

Their first gold medal in fifty-two years and it’s a _demolition_ in the fifth set _._

The noise is atrocious, the Japanese team forming a rapidly-growing dogpile on the court as the coach collapses into a seat and laughs, the reporters converging, Oikawa suddenly yelling at Hajime to help him up, help him up, _help him up they fucking won._ Hajime jumps to his feet and then hauls, Oikawa swinging up to get an arm around his shoulders, pressing his palm flat over Hajime’s chest, urging him into the throng. He’s got one crutch under his other arm and just left the other one for dead, apparently, and Ikeda and Fukao seem them coming and then the entire team is swarming them, deliriously happy bodies on all sides, slapping Hajime’s back just as often as they get Oikawa’s, cheering too loud to make out the words. Bokuto’s holding the second-string libero up by his armpits. Kageyama’s standing in front of them.

“Captain,” he says, voice solemn despite the volume at which he’s got to pitch it. “Thank you very much.”

And then he bows to Oikawa.

Hajime, stationed conveniently in Oikawa’s armpit, sees the change in Oikawa’s expression. The shock, then the delight, then the triumph, small and quickly stifled, and then that look again, like how you look at your favorite dumb cat who, despite all odds, is still alive and whole and just won you an Olympic gold medal.

Hajime beams.

“But of course, Tobio-chan,” Oikawa says, grin splitting his face from ear to ear. “I know you couldn’t have done it without me, anyways.”

Kageyama rises and smiles. The world, thunderous, closes in on them.

First the coach and the manager, yelling at everyone to get their shit together because the reporters are coming, and then the reporters, and the cameras, and the Olympic attendants trying to hustle them off court so they can set up for the medal ceremony, and at some point Oikawa looks down and realizes he’s still wearing a ratty Taylor Swift 1989 t-shirt and shrieks.

“I can’t be on TV like this!” he shouts to the uncaring world, as Hajime props him up and laughs. Oikawa’s leaning full-body against him, warm, loud, and, as ever, way too tall for his damn good. “Someone give me a jersey! No pit stains!”

It’s a madhouse. Kageyama has been pulled away for an interview that will surely go viral in a matter of minutes and Bokuto, intrepid and true, has vaulted the rail into the stands. He’s presumably making his way towards Akaashi and Natsumi, who are already on the court and watching him climb. Akaashi helps Natsumi wave.

“Thank you, Minami, but that’s going to fit me like a circus tent—oh, perfect!” Oikawa says, dragging Hajime hard to the right as he snatches a jersey from Shimaoka’s outstretched hand. “Here, Iwa-chan, hold me up!”

He drops his crutch and pivots on his good foot, suddenly enough that Hajime grabs him with both hands around the waist and immediately realizes he’s been played. Oikawa gets the shirt over his head, still bunched around his elbows, and grins at Hajime. He’s alight with it.

“You just wanted me to feel your abs, you manwhore,” Hajime says, trying for gruff and failing.

“Yes,” Oikawa says, radiating smug, untouchable happiness, “because you love my abs.”

“No comment.”

“You love my abs and you love me.”

“Mostly no comment.”

Oikawa’s arms are still stuck in his shirt. Hajime’s thumbs rub circles into the warm skin below his ribs. Oikawa is, unfortunately, very ripped.

“Say it again,” Oikawa grins, probably knowing exactly what Hajime’s thinking, the bastard. “Go on.”

It’s gonna get to be a problem, if Hajime keeps giving in to his demands.

“I love you, dumbass,” Hajime replies, grinning until his cheeks hurt, as the stadium booms with talk and celebration and Bokuto, up in the stands, shouting for his lost husband.

Oikawa leans in, kisses him, hands riding up his neck and cupping his jaw.

It drowns all the rest of it out.

“Come on, Captain, _seriously?”_ someone finally hollers, sounding despairing, and there’s some flashes, too, probably from the cameras, because Oikawa is shirtless, wounded, and the captain of the new greatest volleyball team in Japanese history, but Hajime doesn’t mind. He barely even notices.

Oikawa is leaning his weight on Hajime’s shoulders. Oikawa is smiling against his mouth.

 

* * *

 

“Yes, Mom,” Hajime sighs, rubbing a knuckle between his eyes as his phone buzzes for the second time in as many minutes against his ear.

“And his knee will be alright after the surgery?”

“I don't know, Mom, we’ll have to see.” Another buzz. Turns out when you kiss your brand new boyfriend on live international broadcasts, a lot of people suddenly start texting you! And don't ever stop!

“And when do you think you’ll have the wedding?”

 _“Jesus,_ mom!” Hajime shouts, flushing abruptly and drawing the attention of every athlete in a six foot radius.

“Well, you've got time to figure it out. Have fun in the parade, love, I'll thank Issei and Takahiro for you!”

“Wait, are they _there?_ Mom, how long have you three been—!”

Hajime’s mom hangs up.

God, and he used to wonder why she and Oikawa got along so well.

“Was she telling you about their monthly book club meetings?”

Hajime spins. “They’re in a _book club with her—_ oh.”

Akaashi, with dearest Natsumi baby-bjorn’d to his chest, smiles. Akaashi smiles because he is fucking with him.

Hajime still scowls.

The massive expanse of parking lot outside the Rose Bowl is packed, some three thousand Olympians and their hangers-on milling around the concrete until the closing ceremonies get underway. A small woman with a megaphone is trying to get all the flagbearers up front. She isn’t having much luck.

“Yeah, whatever, they’re still jackasses who need to stay the fuck away from my mother,” Hajime grumps, digging his hands into his jean pockets. “Though, I, uh—” he pauses. “I probably do owe them a thank you. And you.”

Akaashi is watching him placidly, his smile small and satisfied. “Thanks, man,” Hajime says, sticking out his hand, and smiles back when Akaashi rolls his eyes and shakes it.

“You just needed a push,” Akaashi says, with considerable tact, and jogs a bit in place to make Natsumi cackle. “I’m sure anyone would have done it.”

“Yeah, and apparently they all tried, too,” Hajime says, grinning crookedly. The night, as every night of the past three California weeks has been, is balmy and fine. A wind is coming down from the mountains, tossing Natsumi’s dark few wisps of hair and making the banners on the lightposts swell. “Seriously, you and Bokuto ever make it down to Sendai, you just hit me up. Babysitting any time you want, free of charge.”

“Oh, _absolutely,”_ Akaashi replies, eyes gleaming, and waves contentedly as he ventures off in search of Bokuto. Hajime is left for a moment entirely on his own, to feel the wind between his fingers.

It’s nice. He’ll miss Los Angeles.

He finds Oikawa a few yards into the crowd, crutches under his arms, looming over Hinata. He’s backed by three of his teammates, all of them tall, all of them scowling. They appear to be holding an inquisition.

“And you’re going to care for Tobio-chan?” Oikawa is demanding. “You’re going to water him everyday and make sure he gets enough sun and remember to give him a little fertilizer when his leaves get droopy?”

Hajime remembers when they were all kids, and him and Oikawa ran into Hinata outside the bathroom during regionals. Hinata’s wibbling, fearful look is extremely familiar.

“Leave him alone, fuckhead, you’re gonna make him cry,” Hajime says and Hinata looks damply affronted as Oikawa turns.

Oikawa’s got this beatific look on his face when he sees Hajime, like Hajime walking towards him is the highpoint of his century. He’s had it a lot lately. It’s unselfconscious, makes him look young.

Hajime...well, he could get used to it.

Oikawa stretches out at hand. Hajime, feeling his face grow just a bit warm, lets Oikawa take him and pull him in. The team is jeering the two of them now, but Oikawa’s only got those mooncalf eyes for him.

“Hi,” he says, even though they just fucking saw each other, Hajime literally just stepped away to take his mom’s call. “How’s your mom?”

“Conniving. Why are you interrogating Shrimp-chan?”

“Just doing my due diligence as beloved and attentive Captain. Rescue’s on the way, anyways.”

Hajime follows Oikawa’s gaze over his shoulder. Kageyama has emerged from the crowd, looking like too many people have touched him in the past twenty minutes, and Hinata has attached himself to his side, prattling happily about something or other. He’s got one of Kageyama’s hands in both of his own. Kageyama’s gazing at him in dumb, loving, amazement.

“Can’t believe everyone but me got some goddamn ass on this trip,” Fukao says behind them, holding his hands up in universal beseechment, and Hajime jumps, flushing. Oikawa only grins at his libero, eyes crinkling delightedly.

“There’s always 2028, Fu-chan! Just think how _distinguished_ you’ll look in another four years!”

Fukao threatens violence. Akaashi returns, depositing Bokuto with the rest of the team, who welcome him loudly, and puts a hand to Hajime’s shoulder.

“We should get out of here before they start the parade,” he says as Oikawa leans down on his good foot, making bubbly faces at Natsumi. “We’ll never make it to our seats otherwise.”

“Actually, I’ll, uh, be marching with the team,” Hajime says, tugging at the hem of his slightly too-small Team Japan shirt. “Just in case the jackass needs me to prop him up. You know.”

“Hey, how come you get to bring your beautiful boyfriend along for the parade?” Bokuto demands of Oikawa as Akaashi says, politely, “Hmmm.”

“Oh, shut up,” Hajime snaps, grinning shamefully as Oikawa says, “Because I’m a liar, Bokuto-chan! It’s very cool, very convenient stuff.”

“We’ll see you after,” Akaashi smiles, and detaches Hinata from a blushing Kageyama as he takes his leave. Bokuto stops him for a long, handsy (on Bokuto’s part), kiss to a chorus of complaints, and then it’s just Hajime and the team, waiting to march.

“So,” Hajime says, as the flagbearers finally get their shit together and the music begins to boom from inside the stadium, “I was thinking.”

“Rough stuff for you, eh, Iwa-chan?” Oikawa says, eyes wide and innocent, and Hajime jabs him (carefully) in the ribs.

“Yeah, yeah, fuck you,” Hajime returns, shoving his hands back in his pockets. “What I was thinking was that maybe you might wanna consider like—” he swallows, “...Moving back to Sendai? Not necessarily moving in with me, of course,” he adds, hurriedly, “But just like—it’ll be months before I could get a transfer to a Tokyo station, and if you were in Sendai I could be close by to help after the surgery, and of course it would make your mom happy, and—”

He cuts off. Oikawa’s still smiling, but there’s a shadow to it, something he doesn’t want to say.

“What’s up?” Hajime asks. They’re close together, their own quiet world amid the team and the crowds and the rising echo of the closing ceremonies. Oikawa’s hands tighten around the crossbars of his crutches.

“Oh, it’s a lovely idea, of course,” Oikawa says, voice airy, “Who doesn’t want Oikawa-san to spend more time with them? It’s just—” he swallows, leaning heavier to the side. “I’m not going to be… easy, you know. To deal with. For the next few months.”

Oh. Hajime relaxes. He thought it’d be something way worse.

“Have you ever been?” he asks with a soft grin, and Oikawa bristles.

“Iwa-chan—” he starts, mouth starting to twist, and Hajime wraps his hand around Oikawa’s.

“Tooru,” he says as Oikawa stares, wary, looking like he’s bracing for a blow even as he hopes for anything else, “It’s alright.”

And it is. There’ll be physical therapy, which will hurt. And then there’ll be surgery, which will also hurt. And then there’ll be _more_ physical therapy, which will hurt worst, and if they’re lucky and he plays again, getting back into the game will be slow and frustrating and horribly painful. Or they’ll be unlucky, and that’ll be slow and frustrating and horribly painful, too. Oikawa will probably drift for a while, and he’ll hate himself for drifting, and he’ll hate himself for having bad days, and he’ll likely manage to hate himself for having good ones.

It will, on the whole, be miles from pleasant.

It’ll still be alright.

“I know, okay?” he says, just to Oikawa, watching his eyes go wide, his breath come shaky. “I'm not going to leave again.”

Oikawa’s careful expression cracks, like glass shattering, and when he presses his happy mouth to Hajime’s, Hajime can feel the tears on his cheeks.

“Oh, don't start crying again,” Hajime laughs as Oikawa leans their foreheads together, Hajime’s hand on his chest to keep him balanced.

“God, maybe I'm just experiencing emotion, you massive child,” Oikawa snaps, though his smile is wide and his voice thick. “Ever tried it?”

“This month?” Hajime asks, kissing Oikawa quickly, fleetingly, exulting in the freedom. “Yeah, a little,” he smiles. “Still kinda new to it though.”

“Ugh!!” Oikawa groans, finally leaning back far enough to swat at Hajime’s head. Hajime ducks, laughing. “You’ve got the emotional intelligence of a dog. Or like, a shelf. Fucking terrible.”

“Probably,” Hajime allows, as motion starts to ripple through the crowd. The woman with the megaphone has climbed the base of one of the lampposts now, still shouting directions in a language Hajime doesn’t understand. Hajime grins slyly. “Still figured out I love you, though.”

Oikawa flushes to the tips of his ears, and whacks Hajime’s shin with a crutch. “You’re appalling. Never talk to me again.”

“You wouldn’t be able to stand it,” Hajime returns, teasing, and Oikawa’s smile is lovely and disgraceful and completely full of shit.

Looking at it, it’s like watching the future reconfigure. Like seeing year after year of Hajime’s life fall to faultless planning and shameless charm.

The doors to the stadium swing open, light and music spilling out over the parking lot like the sun cresting the horizon, and the assembled Olympians take their positions.

**Author's Note:**

> THE BIGGEST, BESTEST THANKS TO: Emma and Norway, stars of my heart, who patted my ass through every stage of this fic and left me One Hundred and Sixty comments (and counting!) on the google doc. What good, good friends.
> 
> Oikawa's tswift t-shirt [is chronologically viable as a Lasting High School Obsession and thus I'll fight anyone about it.](http://www.billboard.com/charts/japan-hot-100/2014-11-08) I over-researched a lot of other stuff in this fic, but this one mattered most.
> 
> I'm on tumblr @[lambergeier](http://lambergeier.tumblr.com/post/152100564311/the-night-is-warm-and-replete-with-showy-american), thanks for reading, y'all.


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